nishments, not only of extreme severity, but involving the deepest
disgrace."--_Brigadier-General De Peyster, Report to the Governor of New
York on Municipal Military Systems of Europe, 1851._

[K] "The Board, in the plan of organization, proposes an
Adjutant-General, without rank, for the whole militia of the United
States. The importance of such an officer, attached to the War
Department, it is believed, could not be too highly
estimated."--_Major-General Winfield Scott._

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_What I saw on the West Coast of South and North America,
and at the Hawaiian Islands._ By H. WILLIS BAXLEY, M. D. New
York: D. Appleton & Co.

Charles Lamb describes his old friend, George Dyer, as purchasing a
bulky volume of blank verse solely on the ground that there must be some
good things in an epic of six thousand lines. On the same principle,
there may be assumed to be some good sentences in this octavo of six
hundred pages,--although, if so, they must lurk in some paragraph which
we have unluckily missed in the reading. In the spirit of the book,
however, there is a certain frankness which is a frequent merit in that
class of ex-Secessionists to which this Baltimore physician apparently
belongs. And as their graceful little improprieties in Virginia and
elsewhere are daily making new converts to negro suffrage, so this book,
by its guileless exhibition of the whole inner man of one of Mr.
Buchanan's office-holders, may help to avert the resurrection of the
class whom he represents.

Dr. Baxley claims to have been sent in the year 1860 to the west coast
of America, as Special Commissioner of the United States. What he ought
to have done in that capacity is not stated; what he did is plain. He
sailed along the continent upon a bubble of pro-slavery prejudice, and
brought home his aerial ship intact, while all similar bubbles had burst
during his absence. The book, therefore, takes us back to the good old
times. Every allusion to Slavery reminds our Commissioner of joys now
departed. Every glimpse of a black man in the melancholy misery of
freedom recalls to him those happy scientific reveries contributed to
anthropological lore by Messrs. Nott and Gliddon. He admires each dusky
figure in the direct ratio of its nudity, and every added rag of
civilized clothing seems to him so much subtracted from the proprieties
of life. Of course a colored soldier is the climax of aggravation to his