The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-06-20 00:00:00

REVIEWS OF BOOKS.

Himalayan Journals; or, Notes of a Naturalist
in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepaul Himalayas,
the Khania Mountains, 4c. By Joseph D.
Hooker, M.D. London : Murray.

Among the various branches of science that
have risen to eminence during the long period of
European peace, which has prevailed since nearly
the commencement of the present century, few
have received more practical culture, or yielded
more gratifying results to their cultivators, than
the science of physical geography, and the nume-
rous sub-branches of which it is composed. Ex-
tensive additions have been made to our knowledge
of geodesy, hydrography, botany, and ethnology ;
while geology may be said to have grown into a
science since the thunders of Waterloo, by giving
peace to the continent of Europe, allowed the
energies of her most highly cultivated people to
find other objects of attention than the means of
mutual destruction ; meteorology also has been
studied with sufficient care to enable the observers
of atmospheric phenomena to approximate towards
an exposition of the laws which govern them.
The numerous travellers and navigators who ex-
plore distant regions, instead of acting as mere eye-
witnesses of phenomena which they cannot explain,
and observers of places and circumstances in which '
they can do little more than enact the character of
lookers-on, are now men qualified for the task of
inquiring into the minutest workings of the several
natural and artificial operations by which they are
surrounded, and, accordingly, the books of travels
which now issue from the press are, in general,
deeply laden with the results of scientific research.
The traveller in general . devotes himself to some
defined object of inquiry, towards which his prin-
cipal attention is directed, and this he is enabled
to embellish, by greater or less attention to all the
cognate branches of science to which it is allied,
in addition to illustrating his narratives by personal
experiences. Such a man is the author whose two
admirable volumes are the immediate subject of
the preceding remarks. Dr. Hooker is the son of
Sir W. Hooker, the celebrated botanist, and curator
of Kew Gardens, he himself having entered the
navy at an early period of his life, and as assistant-
surgeon accompanied Sir James Ross's expedition
to the Antarctic regions, and first acquired literary
celebrity by publishing his admirable Antarctic
Flora; and in 1847, under direction of the British
government, and the East India Company, he
proceeded to India for the purpose of exploring
some portion of the Himalayan region, with respect
to its botanical treasures. Besides an able and
most valuable work on the Rhododendrons of the
Sikkim Himalaya, Dr. Hooker has produced the
two volumes now before us, of his three years'
experiences and investigations in those most in-
teresting and little known regions, in which the
operations of nature have been carried on on a scale
of grandeur and magnificence having no parallel
on the surface of the globe.
Unlike the other mountain systems of the world,
the Himalayas are not a mere ridge, but form the
southern rampart of a lofty table-land embracing
the whole country of Tibet. The general surface
of this immense plateau is about 600,000 miles in
extent, and it has a mean altitude of from 12,000
to 14,000 feet above the level of the sea ; while
some portions of it reach 16,000, and from this
table-land the rugged and picturesque peaks of the
Himalayas shoot up in stony corruscations to a
farther elevation of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet,
some of their peaks reaching 28,000 feet, or five
miles and a quarter of perpendicular altitude.
This stupendous mountain range gives rise to
numerous rivers of immense magnitude and great
celebrity, including the Oxus, the Indus, and the
Ganges, the Brahmapootra, the Yangtse-Kiang,
and the Hoang-Ho. In such a range, and so
intersected by noble rivers, it would be impossible
for any one to miss adventures, or to avoid seeing
and admiring scenery as varied in aspect as it is
stupendous in its grandeur. The following picture
is graphic and suggestive; after rising about six
thousand feet upon • the southern spurs of the
Himalayas, the Doctor looks, back and gives his