toward each other with an excessive freedom. The women, in this respect, are very different to the modest and retiring women of the Niam-niam, and are, beyond measure, obtrusive and familiar. Their inquisitiveness was a daily nuisance: they watched me into the depth of the woods, they pestered me by flocking round my tent, and it was a difficult matter to get a bath without being stared at. Toward their husbands they exhibit the highest degree of independence. The position in the household occupied by the men was illustrated by the reply which would be made, if they were solicited to sell any thing as a curiosity: 'Oh, ask my wife; it is hers.' Their general demeanor surprised me very much when I considered the comparative advance of their race in the arts of civilization. Their immodesty far surpassed any thing that I had observed in the very lowest of the negro tribes, and contrasted most unfavorably with the sobriety of the Bongo women, who are submissive to their husbands, and yet not servile. The very scantiness of the clothing of the Monbuttoo women has no excuse. Carved benches are the ordinary seats of the men, but the women generally use a one legged stool! While the Dinka women, leaving perfect nudity as the prerogative of their husbands, are modestly clothed with skins; while the Mittoo and Bongo women wear their girdle of foliage, and the Niam-niam women their apron of hides, the women of the Monbuttoo—where the men are more scrupulously and fully clothed than any of the nations I came across throughout my journeys—go almost entirely naked."
'But, as every page and paragraph of this work is of absorbing interest, we are weary of the mental conflict as to which shall have place in our limited space. We will conclude with the following:
"I always made a rule of eating alone. A solitary European, as he proceeds farther and farther from home, may see his old associations shrink to a minimum; but, so much the more, with pertinacious conservatism, will he cling to the surviving remnants of his own superiority. Nothing can ever divest him of the thought as to how he may maintain the prerogative, which he takes for granted, that he is a being of some higher order. Many a misanthrope, in his disgust at the shady side of our modern culture, may imagine that, to a traveler, in his intercourse with the children of Nature, the thousand necessities of daily life must seem but trifles vain and empty, to be dispensed with without a sigh. Such a one may fancy that the bonds which fasten him to the world of civilization are weak, and all waiting to be rent asunder as soon as Nature is left to assert her unfettered rights; but, from experience, I can assure him that the truth is very different. With the fear of degenerating ever before his eyes, the wanderer from the realms of civilization will surely fix his gaze almost with devotion on the few objects of our Western culture that remain to him, which (however trivial they are in themselves) become to him symbols little less than sacred. Tables and chairs, knives and forks, bedding, and even pocket-handkerchiefs, will assume an importance that could never have been anticipated, and it is hardly too much to aver that they will rise to a share in his affections."
Fungi: their Nature and Uses. By M. C. Cooke and M. J. Berkeley. New York: D. Appleton & Co. "International Scientific Series," No. XV. Pp. 800. Price, $1.50.
A very interesting tract of the vegetable kingdom, which has hitherto received but little popular attention, is here reported upon by two of the most eminent English authorities upon the subject. In all that relates to those numerous and curious forms of vegetable growth called fungi, in their familiar forms, as seen by everybody in field and forest, and in their still more wonderful microscopic varieties. Rev. M. J. Berkeley, the venerable Rector of Sibbertoft, is perhaps the first authority in the world. Though a hard-working clergyman, he has found time to master and to extend one of the most interesting provinces of botany hitherto as obscure as it is extensive. He engaged to produce a book for the "International Series" upon this subject, but, finding, from the multiplicity of bis engagements and his uncertain health, that he could not accomplish it satisfactorily, he associated with himself the next ablest man of England in this field, Dr. M. C. Cooke, who has done the principal work, which now appears under the critical editorship of Dr. Berkeley himself. Readers who desire to become acquainted with the subject-matter of this volume, and to form some general idea of its scope and importance, are referred to the opening article of the present number of the Monthly, and, if its perusal
