The Two Americas ; an Account of Sport and Travel.
By Major Sir Rose Lambert Price, Bart. (Sampson Low and Co.)—The author visited the New World in search of sport, keeping to the seaboard of the southern continent, and extending his journeys into the interior of the northern. He was disappointed in Patagonia, though he got some pretty duck-shooting ; thought better of Chili than he did of Peru or Mexico, made his greatest success in salmon-fishing in the Sacramento, and his most remarkable exploit in swimming after and catching a turtle, with a boat's crew to keep off the sharks ; visited Utah, and thought the assembled Mormons the ugliest and meanest-looking lot of people that he had ever seen, was disgusted with the" fifty-cents" system at Niagara, and generally "saw the cities and learnt the thoughts of many men," with much satisfaction to himself, and not without some profit to his readers. He is always entertaining, and when the occasion offers shows good sense and shrewdness, though we must say that his ideas of government are of a crude, drum -head- court-martial kind. He records a very curious fact which, as he says, seems opposed to received theories about the cause of earthquakes :—A shock terrified Virginia City, a place not unused to such excitements. The first fear passed away, every one rushed to the mines, sure that some terrible catastrophe had happened there. But the miners, fifteen hundred feet under ground, had felt nothing of it. Sir Rose Price, who has served with distinction in the Marines, did not fail to keep his eyes open for matters of professional interest. His note on the " trowel- bayonet " used by the regular forces of the United States is worth con- sidering. As not more than one in a hundred of the soldiers who fall in a campaign are killed by the bayonet, while at the same time the weapon is necessary for its moral effect, it is well to utilise it in other ways. It can defend, if it is not often used for offence. An American officer told the author that "in less than ten minutes he saw a company completely shelter themselves (on rather hard ground, into the bargain) from musketry."
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