wades slowly through his books, and leaves them with a
feeling of intense disgust. Such a vast gathering of facts merely to
produce this melancholy confusion of details! You feel that his eminence
in the science must be from the circumstance that no one else is dull
enough and patient enough to gather such a museum of facts in regard
to human beings. The mind is utterly confused as to divisions of human
races, and is ready to conclude that there must be almost as many
varieties of man as there are tribes or dialects, and that Ethnology has
not yet reached the position of a science.

The reader must pardon the bitterness of our feelings; but we are just
smarting from a prolonged perusal of all Mr. Latham's works, especially
the two volumes whose title is given above; and that we may have
sympathy, if only in a faint degree, from our friends, we quote a few
passages, taken at random, though we cannot possibly thus convey an
adequate conception of the infinite dulness of the work.

The following is his elegant introduction:--

"I follow the Horatian rule, and plunge, at
once, _in medias res_. I am on the Indus, but
not on the Indian portion of it. I am on the
Himalayas, but not on their southern side. I
am on the northwestern ranges, with Tartary
on the north, Bokhara on the west, and Hindostan
on the south. I am in a neighborhood
where three great religions meet: Mahometanism,
Buddhism. Brahminism. I _must_ begin
somewhere; and here is my beginning."--
Vol. i. p. 1.

The following is his analysis of the beautiful Finnish Kalevala:--

"Wainamoinen is much of a smith, and more of a harper. Illmarinen is
most of a smith. Lemminkainen is much of a harper, and little of a
smith. The hand of the daughter of the mistress of Pohjola is what, each
and all, the three sons of Kalevala strive to win,--a hand which the
mother of the owner will give to any one who can make for her and
for Pohjola _Sampo_, Wainamoinen will not; but he knows of one who
will,--Illmarinen. Illmarinen makes it, and gains the mother's consent
thereby. But the daughter requires another service. He must hunt down
the elk of Tunela. We now see the way in which the actions of the heroes
are, at one and the same time, separate and connected. Wainamoinen
tries; Illmarinen tries (and eventually wins); Lemminkainen tries. There
are alternations of friendship and enmity. Sampo is made and presented.
It is then wanted back again.

"'Gi