Our Trip to Burmah, with Notes on that Country. By
Surgeon- General C. A. Gordon, M.D. (Bailliere, Tindal, and Cox.)—This is an entertaining volume, containing much lively description and many shrewd observations on men and things. Dr. Gordon travelled in company with the Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army and his Staff, but no one can accuse him of mixing up with his narrative too much of the personal element. On the contrary, he tells next to nothing, beyond the bare itinerary, of the proceedings of himself and his fellow-travellers. Notes on the botany of the country, on the religions and social habits of its peoples, on barracks and prisons, on its diseases—there is a mention of leprosy, which, it seems, they try to care with wood-oil—in fact, on all conceivable subjects, following each other in rapid and not very orderly succession. We may say, in troth, that a little more order would have been desirable, and that we should have carried away more definite ideas of the country, if the author had communicated the information which he has to give us, not as he happened to become possessed of it, bat according to some principle of arrange- ment. The " Notes " which are appended to the diary of travel contain the substance of sundry official reports, and are not the least valuable portion of the -book. The illustrations are very curious. Six of them, which are rendered by chromo-lithography, are the work of a native Burmese artist. There are representations of various native per- sonages. They ought to be prized, as the artist was imprisoned for the offence of making them. Some characteristic sketches are of un- known authorship. They were found in a transit-carriage, without any mark by which the owner's name could be traced. The rest are, for the most part, photographs. Among numberless curiosities of Bur- mese manners, nothing will seem more strange than a fact which Dr. Garden himself observed, —a Burmese woman quieting a child at the breast by giving it a cheroot to smoke.
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