Life in Normal*. Two Vols. (Edmonston and Douglas.)—This work appears
to have been written fourteen years ago, by a Highland gentleman residing in Normandy, who is now dead. The principal subjects handled in it are French cooking, fishing, natural history, farming, gardening, and politics ; and the main object which its author had in view was to benefit the Scotch poor by describing to them in- genious foreign devices for ensnaring, growing, and gathering food, and for making it eatable when procured. The book is thrown into the nar- rative form, and consists, in fact, of a description of a fishing excursion undertaken by two Scotch gentlemen, principally on the coast between Granville and Avra.nches. The incidents which it contains, though, for the most part, simple enough, are interesting and well told; and they
are interspersed and relieved by frequent discussions on sporting and zoological matters, which convey a good deal of pleasant information respecting the natural history of the Norman coast, and the manners and customs of its inhabitants. The publishers of the book appear, however, to have lost sight of the object with which it was originally composed; for they have issued it in so handsome and expensive a form as necessarily to place it quite beyond the reach of the class for whose instruction it was mainly designed.
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