breasts resembling those of a woman. Though these monstrous creatures, he tells us, were some of them twenty feet long, they came close to the shore, where the water was only three or four feet deep, to feed on the grass at the bottom, sometimes like a flock of sheep of three or four hundred together: they were so tame that he and his companions could wade among them and feel which was fattest and fittest for the knife; for their flesh was excellent, and tasted like the finest veal. This was at the Isle of Rodriguez or Diego Ruys, where Lamentins are now as scarce as Dugons on the coast of New Holland.

M. Péron and the other naturalists deserve great credit for their industry and perseverance in collecting objects of natural history with all the disadvantages under which they were placed by a harsh and unfeeling Commander; who seems to have entertained a thorough contempt for all knowledge not connected with his own. profession, and who, even in that department, as far as we can discover, has done little or nothing for science. As M. Péron's part of the volume finishes, by his death, with the land of Endracht, we shall give an instance of the brutal treatment which the naturalists received there from Captain Baudin, which will serve also as a specimen of our author's manner. They had gone on shore to add to their collections, and being drawn off by some natives, who were not of the gigantic size indicated by the prints of feet seen hereabouts by Vlaming in 1697, and by their own officers on their first visit, they strayed so far as to lose themselves among the thickets: not a breath of wind refreshed the atmosphere; the heat of the mid-day sun reflected from the sandy surface was insupportable; and the stunted brushwood afforded them no shelter; they were laden with plants and shells; famished with hunger and choaked with thirstand, in this state, after three hours of painful travelling, they found themselves close to the place from which they had set out; they determined therefore to follow the winding of the shore, however long it might prove.

'An excessive and continual sweat dissolved our bodies. Our weakness was soon at its height. In vain did we fill our mouths with little pebbles to excite the secretion of a few drops of saliva ;—the source of it appeared to be dried up; a feeling of dryness, of painful aridity, an insupportable bitterness made respiration difficult, and in some degree painful; our trembling limbs could no longer sustain us; at every moment, one or other fell down; and it was some time before we had the power to rise.

'I was now constrained to abandon the greater part of the rich collection which I had just obtained at the expense of so much toil and danger, and which the kind M. Guichenault had had the complaisance to assist me in carrying thus far; but soon himself sinking under the weight of fatigue and heat, of thirst and hunger, he fell upon

the ground, pale, disfigured, his eyes nearly closed. All our assistance was of no avail; he could no longer stand up; and he wished, he said, to die on the spot. While waiting till our unfortunate companion should recover some strength, I proposed to M. Petit to plunge ourselves into the sea up to the breast, and to remain there some minutes, being well convinced beforehand that this kind of bath would bring a little relief to our sufferings. The effect far surpassed all my hopes. An agreeable coolness seemed to penetrate through every pore; our mouths became less scorched; the painful pinching which we felt in the stomach and bowels, ceased as if by enchantment; we perceived our vigour renewing-in one word, this salutary bath snatched us in all probability out of the hands of death: under its gentle influence M. Guichenault appeared to revive. To prolong the good effects which we experienced from it, we resolved, after abandoning part of our clothes and our shoes and stockings, to continue our journey in the sea. At sun-set, a gentle breeze sprung up; we left the water to resume the journey on the shore, and walk if possible a little more quick. Our weakness immediately returned, and night surprized us in the midst of the most laborious efforts.'

At length however they perceived a large fire which their companions had made to serve them as a guide, and they succeeded in joining them between 10 and 11 o'clock at night.

But at this moment the prostration of our strength was at its height; within two hundred paces of the spot, we fell as if lifeless on the strand. Our kind companions ran eagerly towards us; they raised us up, they supported us, and, making several fires around us, succeeded in rekindling the spark of life just ready to expire. Their eagerness was so much the more active as they had already abandoned all hope of seeing us again. . . . . Our sufferings however were very far from having attained their limit--no kind of food or drink remained in the boat; we had to pass the whole night stretched on the sand, in our clothes drenched with sea water; and to finish our misery, a thick fog which rose the following morning on the surface of the sea did not allow us (for want of a compass) to rejoin the ship before two o'clock in the afternoon. At this period we found ourselves reduced to the most deplorable condition. For forty-four hours we had neither drank nor eaten, and we had walked fourteen of that number. Pale and trembling, with hollow eyes and lifeless countenances, scarcely could we support ourselves, scarcely could we distinguish objects. I no longer heard any thing, and my parched tongue refused its speech.' (p. 223.)

Every one was moved with compassion except the Commander, who fined M. de Mont-Bazin, (the officer of the boat,) in ten francs for each of the three guns fired the preceding evening as a signal for him to return on board, and upbraided him for not having left the whole three to their fate. And yet,' says M. Péron, to save the life of this unhappy man at Timor I divided with his physician the slender provision of excellent Peruvian bark

which I had kept for myself.'-Captain Baudin* certainly appears to have been of a most unhappy and unaccommodating disposition, without one single qualification for conducting a voyage of discovery: he died at the Isle of France and was buried the day following with military honours, which is all that M. Freycinet, his first lieutenant, thinks proper to say of him.

M. Freycinet now continues the narrative of their operations on the second visit to the coasts of De Witt's Land, the geography of which still remains precisely in the same imperfect state in which Dampier found and left it. The numerous and almost continuous banks of sand, and reefs of coral rocks, with which it is defended, prevented all access to the shore; but the same reefs and banks were favourable to their search for objects of natural history, and assisted very materially in the enlargement of their collections: among other marine productions was a great number of sea-snakes, of all colours and proportions; but what particularly attracted their attention, was a kind of greyish coloured dust which covered the sea for a space of more than twenty leagues from east to west. The same appearance under different colours has been observed by various navigators, and is mentioned by Banks and Solander on the coasts of New Guinea, where the sailors gave it the name of seasawdust. On examining it with a microscope every atom appeared to have so regular and constant a conformation, that no doubt could exist of their being so many minute organized bodies; and they considered them to be the eggs or spawn of some species of marine animal. The seas of blood which are mentioned by several celebrated navigators are supposed to owe their tinge to a single species of microscopical crustacea.

On approaching the Isles of the Institute, an archipelago consisting of about twenty islets, and situated about the latitude 14°, a boat was sent to examine the Isle Cassini; on its return the officer reported that, within the group of islands, he had fallen in with a flotilla of Malay proas, twenty-four or five in number, which had come from Macassar for the purpose of fishing for a species of Holothuria, known by the several names of Tripan, Biche de mer, and Sea-slug. The proas were all under the orders of an old Malay Raja, and one little Chinese compass of two inches in diameter was the sole instrument that directed the fleet, sailing to its destination with the north-west and returning home with the opposite monsoon. It may be remembered that Captain Flinders met with a much more numerous fleet in the great Gulf of Carpentaria employed in the same fishery; and the

The name led us into a mistake in our review of the first volume: It was another' Baudin who fell in the battle of Trafalgar.

only difference we perceive between his account of preparing the tripan,' and that here given is, that in the former they are said to be dried by the fire of green wood, in the latter entirely by the The two or three pages of trash connected with these' priapes marines,' decency demands of us to pass over; like the loves of the sea-elephant, they are only calculated for the meridian of Paris.

sun.

From De Witt's Land they proceed a second time to the Island of Timor, and from thence again towards De Witt's Land, which however they were unable to approach: they next tried to proceed to the south-west point of New Guinea; but finding the wind and the weather against them, and the sick list rapidly increasing, they bore up for the Isle of France. On passing the Cape, they called at Table Bay, where a committee of MM. Péron, Le Sueur, and Doctor Raynier de Klerk Dibbez, sat in judgment sur un objet assez délicat-ce fameux tablier des femmes Hottentotes.' The result of an examination which we are assured was attentif et prolongé,' is conveyed under ten distinct propositions, of which we shall content ourselves by asserting, on our own knowledge, that no less than seven of them are absolutely false. It is rather too much for a person who never set foot beyond Cape Town to tell the world that all the travellers into the interior of southern Africa, from its first discovery to the visit of M. Péron, have been mistaken; that the Houzuanas (who have no existence but in Vaillant's book) are Boschimans, and that the Boschimans are a people totally distinct from Hottentots. But a French savant must either get rid of his conceptions in the shape of a theory, or burst.

On comparing the general chart of New Holland constructed by Captain Flinders with that which accompanies this volume of Péron, and which is in fact a copy of that published by M. Freycinet in the nautical and geographical account of the voyage, it must strike every one how very well those parts of the latter are filled up, which were surveyed by Captain Flinders, or laid down by him from the surveys of his predecessors, Cook, Vancouver, and Dentrecasteaux, and how meagre is the whole line of the west and north-west coasts, which none of these able navigators had explored, but which was visited twice, and part of it three times, by Captain Baudin. If we except the Baie du Géographe on the Land of Leuwen; a more detailed but still incomplete survey of Shark's Bay on the Land of Endracht; a few clusters of reefs and islets along the extensive coast of De Witt's Land, with here and there a point of land or an undetermined gulph, the former seen at such a distance as to leave a doubt as to the continuity of the coast, and the latter purely conjectural; the whole of this extensive coast from Cape Van Dieman to Cape Leuwen of the old charts, or from Cape Leoben to Cape Gosselin of the

French,

French, remains pretty nearly in the same state of uncertainty in which it was previous to this voyage of discovery, and may yet be considered as unexplored.

It is scarcely to be conceived that, with two ships and a small vessel, (the Casuarina afterwards added,) those who had the conduct of the expedition should not have made every exertion to determine that most extraordinary problem in geography-the existence or non-existence of some large river on the western side of New Holland. That there exists none deserving the name from Cape Leuwen on the west to Cape Howe on the east; nor from thence to Cape York, on the north; nor in the whole sweep of the Gulph of Carpentaria, is no longer a matter of opinion; but whether any river may discharge itself on the western and north-western coast from Cape Leuwen to Cape Arnheim still remains to be solved. The space to be explored indeed may almost be narrowed to the coast of De Witt's Land between Cape North-West (here impudently altered to Cape Murat) and Cape Arnheim; and from the observations of that excellent old navigator Dampier it may be inferred that the opening behind the group of Rosemary Islands (changed with equal effrontery to the Iles de Montebello) holds out the most probable hopes of finding such a river.-'Hitherto,' says Dampier, we had found but little tides; but by the height, and strength and course of them hereabouts, it should seem, that if there be such a passage or strait going through eastward to the great South Sea, as I said one might suspect, one would expect to find the mouth of it somewhere between this place (latitude 18° 21') and Rosemary Island.' (vol. iii. p. 150.) Unless,' he afterwards observes, the high tides and great indraught thereabouts should be occasioned by the mouth of some large river; which hath often low lands on each side of its outlet, and many islands and shoals lying at its entrance.' (Contin. p. 6.)

M. Freycinet is about to proceed, or has already sailed, to endeavour to complete the discovery and survey of the western and north-western coasts of New Holland; but, we are glad to learn, that as Captain Baudin was anticipated by Captain Flinders, so wili M. Freycinet be by Lieutenant King, who, under happier auspices, we trust, left England some months ago for this very purpose.

This however, we are given to understand, is but a secondary object of the French voyage; the first being that of collecting a number of facts, on various points of the southern hemisphere, for the purpose of ascertaining to a greater degree of precision than is yet known, two objects of no less importance to physical science than to geography-the first is, by a set of experiments on the declination and inclination of the magnetic needle, at

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several