agricultural settler as an American citizen, and to
instruct the representatives of the state at Washington
to obtain the right of so disposing of the public lands.
In regard to the mines, the report proposes that the
right of mining should be limited to American citizens.
The amount of gold exported in 1851 is given by the
custom-house clearances at $56,000,000, and
compounded at $12,000,000, taken out of the country
by individuals returning to other countries. But a
falling off is anticipated for the present year, owing
to a change of system of mining, changing from
placers to quartz veins, the former beginning to
be exhausted, and the latter in the act of being
established. In the gold regions along the San Joaquin,
Trinity, and Tresno rivers, a country 600 miles long
and 30 wide, there are now about a hundred quartz
mines opened, at the cost of $10,000 each on an
average, with mills for crushing the ore. It is doubtful,
says the report, that these establishments will pay at
first, till better experience has been made in the
working of them; but after a few years California will
have a steady supply of gold, though it may not be
so productive to single individuals as the placers
have been.

NARRATIVE OF LITERATURE AND ART.

THE principal contributions to the literature of the
month have been in the department of Voyages and
Travels, and Observations on Foreign countries. The
late governor of Hong-Kong, Sir John Francis Davis,
has published two volumes on China during the War,
and since the Peace, the first of which is mainly
composed of extracts from Chinese official papers written
during the opium war, and presenting a very amusing
history of the conflict seen from the Chinese point of
view. The idea of the Chinese character presented in
these grave documents is, in its extremes of ingenuity
and ignorance, such as one might rather have expected
to derive from the exuberant whim and fancy of Swift
or Rabelais than from serious official papers. Sir
John Davis's second volume gives us the result of his
own four years' administration of our new dependency in
China. A book on a congenial subject, Japan and the
Japanese, is the reprint of an interesting narrative of a
Russian officer's captivity among that inhospitable
people some forty years ago, suggested by the interest
at present felt in the result of the American expedition
to Japan. The case of Captain Golownin is exactly
similar to those for which the United States government
is now bent on obtaining redress. Sixteen Months
in the Danish Isles, by Andrew Hamilton, contains a
fuller account of existing life in Denmark at the
present day, of the condition of the country, and the
social habits of various classes of the people, than any
English traveller had before given us. Mr Laing's
volume on the same subject, Observations on the Social
and Political State of Denmark and the Duchies of
Sleswic and Holstein in 1851, is more in the nature
of a political treatise illustrating the late armed
dispute of the Germans and the Danes; but it contains
also much valuable and acute observation on the society
and civilisation of Denmark in the nineteenth century.
Our Antipodes describes a recent residence in the
Australasian colonies, by Lieutenant-Colonel Mundy,
who divides his attention pretty equally between Botany
Bay and Sidney, New Zealand and Van Diemen's
Land, describing the varieties of emigrant and convict
life, entering with great relish into all the field sports of
the antipodes, and taking his readers for a fortnight's
excursion to the gold diggings. Stray Leaves from an
Arctic Journal, by Lieutenant Osborne, affords us
another spirited testimony of the zeal which has
animated the search for Franklin and his companions,
of the cheerful endurance with which the hardships of
the various exploring expeditions have been undergone,
and the apparently indestructible hope which still sustains
all engaged in them. The book possesses also an
independent interest, as the first account we have had of a
voyage by steam in the polar regions. Mr. F. A. Neale's
Narrative of a Residence in Siam, contains some lively
sketches of a people very imperfectly known; and
Captain Smith's narrative of a Five Years' Residence
in Nepaul, contains much clever writing and descriptive
adventure in connection with one of the least familiar
and most interesting parts of the great empire of India.
Mr. Laurance Oliphant's Journey to Nepaul has a more
restricted character, being chiefly occupied with a
description of the Nepaulese capital, Katmandu, and of
the camp of Jung Bahadoor, the chief who so lately was
accredited to England. Mr. Oliphant shows us that
celebrated Nepaulese ambassador at home, and gives a very
interesting sketch of his earlier career. His little
volume is the last of Mr. Murray's Railway Series;
and the latest addition to the similar Series published
by Messrs. Longman contains a translation of very vivid
and striking African Wanderings, by an enterprising
German traveller, Ferdinand Werne. Thirty-five
Years in the East is an eccentric omnium-gatherum of
Eastern experience, comprising adventures, discoveries,
experiments, and historical sketches, gathered in the
Punjab and Cashmere by a German practitioner, Mr.
John Martin Hönigberger, late physician to the court
of Lahore. Medicine, botany, and pharmacy, figure
largely in this volume; in which is also set forth "an
original Materia Medica," and a "Medical Vocabulary
in four European and five Eastern languages."

The additions to the literature of the month, which
rank next in importance to these, have been made in
the department of Biography. The Rev. Dr. Hanna has
concluded the Life of Chalmers in a fourth volume,
which comprises the last thirteen years of the great
Presbyterian minister's life, and includes the memorable
free-church disruption in which Chalmers bore so
distinguished a part. Mrs. Romer has commenced, and a
Roman Catholic clergyman completed, under the somewhat
affected title of Filia Dolorosa, a life of the ill-
starred daughter of Louis XVI., the last of the French
dauphines, the Duchess of Angoulême. Miss Pardoe,
selecting a heroine of very opposite character and
fortunes, has devoted three large volumes to a Life
of Mary de Medicis, the too celebrated Regent of
France under the thirteenth Louis. Mr. Thomas
Wright has translated and edited a new Life of King
Alfred by a celebrated German scholar, Dr. Reinhold
Pauli. Mr. William Pollard Urquhart has published a
somewhat elaborate narrative of the Life and Times of
Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, introduced by a
preliminary sketch of the history of Italy. Dr. Knox has
indulged a somewhat eccentric taste for biographical
comparison by publishing a treatise called Great Artists
and Great Anatomists, in which such names and such
careers as those of Raffaelle and Cuvier are made to run
side by side. Dr. W. Smith has compressed some selections
from his celebrated Classical Dictionaries into a
compact and precious volume for the use of schools, with
the title of a Smaller Classical Dictionary of Biography,
Mythology, and Geography. To Mr. John Burnet and
Mr. Peter Cunningham we are indebted for an interesting
volume entitled Turner and his Works, comprising
a memoir of the great artist's life, specimens of his works
strikingly engraved in mezzotint, and critical remarks
upon his principles of painting. Miss Strickland has
completed, in an eighth volume, the enlarged edition of
her Lives of the Queens of England; and a re-publication
has been undertaken, in four volumes, of Hazlitt's
Life of Napoleon Buonaparte.

In Political Science we have to mention, as welcome
information to all thoughtful readers, the appearance of
Mr. George Cornewall Lewis's Treatise on the Methods
of Observation and Reasoning in Politics. Mr. Thomas
Doubleday has published a volume on Mundane Moral
Government, in which he seeks to demonstrate its
analogy with systems of material government. Mr.
Joseph Moseley has written a treatise on Political
Elements; or, the Progress of Modern Legislation.
Mr. Jellinger Symons has, in a small volume, stated his