age from the watershed, enclosing
some fertile valleys along the courses of the rivers, inhabited by a
hardy population that is broken up into manifold clans and sects by
the configuration of their country. The Caucasus, as we learn from Mr.
Baddeley, 'is peopled by a greater number of different tribes and
races than any similar extent on the surface of the globe'; and it is
precisely from the same causes, difficulty of intercourse between
villages secluded in the valleys or perched on the heights, scarcity
of sustenance, inbred jealousy of each other, feuds and factions, that
the groups of the Afghan borderland dwell apart, become estranged or
hostile, are at constant war with each other, and cannot unite against
a common enemy. But while in the Caucasus this trituration of the
people has produced a multiplicity of dialects, the Afghan borderers
speak a language that is generally the same.

In Dr. Pennell's book, the title of which stands at the head of this
article, we have a vivid description, drawn from life, of the names,
habits, and peculiarities of these primitive communities, with many
incidental examples of the relations existing between them and the
British officers who are in touch with them on the frontier. Lord
Roberts, in a short introduction that may be taken as a guarantee of
the accuracy and authenticity of the volume's contents, tells us that
it is a valuable record of sixteen years' good work by a medical
missionary in charge of a mission station at Bannu, on the
north-western frontier of India. And Dr. Pennell's experience,
acquired in the prodigious enterprise of taming and converting to
Christianity some of the most murderous ruffians and inveterate
robbers in Asia, has provided him with a rare insight into their
character, and furnished him with numerous anecdotes of their strange
inconsistencies and wayward, impulsive nature. On the Afghan frontier,
indeed, we may survey a situation that has frequently recurred in the
history of organised governments, whenever they have found themselves
in contact, and therefore in collision, with intractable barbarism.
Immediately across the border line may be seen in the Afridi tribes a
complete and living picture of man in his aboriginal condition of
perpetual war, under no government at all, in daily peril of ending by
a violent death a life that in the pithy words of Hobbes is 'poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.' A few steps back into the British district
bri