mischief. So far our troops had suffered but little from fighting, but the miseries they had to undergo from the mud, through which they had to march, were worse to bear than a sharp fight. Το aggravate them still further, a sudden rise of the Peiho inundated that portion of the camp occupied by the 60th Rifles, and so rapidly did the water rise, that but for the assistance rendered them by a thousand men despatched by Sir John Michell for the purpose of aiding them, their kits and ammunition would have been submerged before they could have made their escape from the place.

The next movement was against the Taku Forts, and here we had the first opportunity of seeing that whenever the Chinese are well-armed and drilled, they will be able to successfully resist the attacks of any European nation. In the course of the bombardment, two of their magazines were exploded by the shells of the allies, notwithstanding which they continued their resistance with undiminished resolution, though the skill of their gunners was very far from being equal to their courage. Nor was the display of their courage limited to a distant fire of artillery; they resisted the efforts of the allies to storm the fort with great bravery, and a considerable number of them were bayonetted after an entry had been effected. In the capture of this fort, our loss was somewhat heavy; the fighting lasted three hours and a half; we had twenty-two officers wounded, seventeen men killed, and one hundred and sixtytwo wounded. The French loss was two officers killed, and eleven wounded, fifteen men killed, and one hundred and thirty wounded. Several of our officers distinguished themselves greatly in this affair. In the face of a shower of bullets which poured upon them incessantly, Lieutenant Rogers and a part of his men swam the ditches, pulled up a portion of the bamboo stakes which intervened between them and the wall of the fort, and succeeded in establishing themselves at its foot. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas followed with the storming companies of the 67th, part of whom availed themselves of the means of crossing provided by the French, and in a short time they had forced an entry into the fort, Lieutenant Rogers, and a French drummer named Fachard being the first who entered. For his gallant conduct in this affair, Lieutenant Rogers received the Victoria Cross, as did also Lieutenant E. H. Lenon, Ensign J. W. Chaplin, Lieutenant N. Burslem, and privates J. McDougall and T. Lane. Sir Robert Napier, who commanded the attack, and who had been suffering from the commencement from an intermittent fever, had two narrow escapes, one bullet smashed the glass he held in his hand, and another ripped open his boot. His aide-de-camp, Captain Broke, was almost equally fortunate, a bullet passed through his helmet, and a second wounded him in the thigh without killing him. Brigadier Reeves was another who distinguished himself, for though wounded in three places, he remained in front until the fort was captured.

It was lucky for us that we had been so far successful before the

rain came on, for before we had captured the whole of the forts, it poured down in torrents, and in a very short time that which had been a mud flat was converted into a lake of liquid mud from one to three feet in depth. Happily, negotiation sufficed to obtain possession of the rest of the forts, so that there was no more useless bloodshed at this place." Besides a large quantity of munition of war, five hundred guns, many of them brass, fell into our hands. Judging from what Dr. Rennie says of the behaviour of the people they saw on their voyage up the Peiho to Tien-tsin, the Chinese have no feeling of nationality, in other words, they do not identify themselves with the acts of their government. They seemed to think that it was no affair of theirs that their government had thought fit to go to war with the barbarians, and that they were in no way concerned thereby, and manifested no more dread of us than if our ships of war had been trading junks; their vessels continued their course up the stream we were ascending without making any effort to get out of our way, or even manifesting surprise at the sight of such a number of foreign vessels propelled by steam. Even the people who resided in the towns and villages we passed, though they showed an intelligent curiosity, manifested no fear, on the contrary, when a French gun-boat got aground, they laid hold of a hawser that was thrown out to them for the purpose, and pulled at it lustily, and so they did for us when one of ours got aground. There was no compulsion whatever in the case, it was an act of pure good-will, and by their running along the bank beside the vessel after they had got it afloat, they showed their readiness to repeat the service if it were required. A further proof of the absence of any hostile feeling towards us was furnished by the quiet civility of the inhabitants of Tien-tsin after we had occupied that city. Whatever may be said of the Chinese, they are undoubtedly eminently civilised as a people, and they show this in their idea of justice, and in a variety of ways, and it is no fault of theirs if their Government, from too exalted a notion of the strength of the nation they govern, have shown themselves arrogant towards foreigners; in fact, they are rather too advanced in their ideas in some respects, and it appears carry out the Malthusian doctrine that those who come into the world when the population of a country is so numerous that its resources are only just adequate to its maintenance, should be told that nature had not provided the means for supporting them, and therefore they must depart out of it forthwith. True, Dr. Rennie only speaks of the Baby Tower, near Shanghai, as a receptacle for dead babies, whose parents are too poor to bury them in the ordinary way, a mode of disposing of them not very different from that which exists in countries nearer to us than China, for we have seen as many as five at a time lying on a table in a church at Lisbon. But we have every reason to believe that in China a good many of those who are thrown into the tower, even if dead before they are thrown in, do not die from natural

causes. We have seen a letter, from a member of a European sisterhood established there, confirming this; a woman on one occasion actually insisting that in addition to relieving her of her infant, they should pay her something for it, threatening when they refused that she would take it away and throw it in the tower. It would be quite a mistake, however, to suppose that the Chinese are not affectionate parents; at page 200 occurs an exceedingly interesting anecdote in illustration of this. "Returning to Tien-Tsin, says the author, "I met two, men carrying a small coffin, a respectable-looking man, walking a little way behind it, came up, and with an expression of grief, pointed to the coffin and then to himself, and holding up his fingers, indicated that the child was five years old, then holding up his hand a little way from the ground to show its height, he burst into tears, and continued his course home with the coffin." There is more true pathos in this little anecdote, to our thinking, than in a hundred like that of Sterne's Maria. Other interesting anecdotes illustrative of Chinese manners abound in the book.

In what other country in the world would a case like the following have occurred. "Mr. Bruce mentioned to me that shortly after the insolent reply to the British ultimatum from Pekin, Soochow fell into the hands of the rebels. Immediately afterwards, Ho, the Governor General of the Two-Kwang, a high Chinese official whose name I forget, and Wu, the Tautai of Shanghai called on Mr. Bruce and tried to persuade him to march troops against Soochow and retake it. Mr. Bruce hinted to them that we were on the eve of going to war, and asked them how they were to get us out of Soochow supposing we retook it for them. They all three jumped up from their seats and said they know us, and had perfect confidence in us, and that the cause of all our misunderstanding was that they did not know us at Pekin." It has often been said that the Chinese regard death with singular indifference, and that a man sentenced to death may procure a substitute for a few dollars. This, however, can only be p evious to the apprehension of the real criminal by bribing a man to give himself up as the offender, or by connivance with the governor of the prison after sentence. A touching instance of the self-sacrifice of a Chinese Curtius is related by Mr. Bruce. The collector of the land tax at a place near Ningpo tried to inflict a harder "squeeze" than usual on the villagers, whereupon they turned out and began to destroy the property of the mandarin, who sent for some troops to put down the outbreak. To save the lives of his fellow-villagers, the leader of the rioters offered, on condition of their subscribing a sum of money sufficient for the support of his family and to erect a monument to his memory, to deliver himself up as a sacrifice for the common-good; an offer which was accepted by them, and he accordingly gave himself up and was beheaded. Robberies of our troops by the Chinese were probably less frequent than the opposite;

some amusing instances however are given of these. Captain Williams, in the middle of the night hearing a noise in his room, jumped out of bed, struck a light and drew his sword, when a robber popped out his head from beneath the bed, and with most perfect self-possession gave him the customary salutation of chinchin" Another fellow made a hole in the chimney of Mr. Hemming's room and abstracted the charcoal from off the fire, to the intense bewilderment of his servant, who could not understand where it went to until the discovery of the hole was made. Lieutenant Alpin lost something from off his fire more valuable than charcoal, namely his copper kettle. He was lying in bed looking at it when it suddenly disappeared up the chimney.

In a strange and thickly-populated country like China there must have been so much to see that amusements were not so much required by our army as they would have been elsewhere, nevertheless. there was not altogether an absence of them. In the cold weather, and it is intensely cold in the winter in China, for bread was cut up by means of a saw, and the porter was served out in lumps instead of in cans, there was sleighing on the Peiho; hunting paper foxes driven through the air by the wind, and hawking. The hawking however partook of the sport of coursing, for the game pursued was the hare, which was ridden after until the hawk suddenly descended upon the unfortunate animal. Curiously enough the manner in which this sport is conducted, bears an exact resemblance to that given in the account of the experience of the English Zouave in Algeria, published in this Magazine some months ago.

A few words on the subject of the population of China, and we must follow our author to Japan. The population of China has always been a subject of dispute, the numbers given differing so widely that every statement could only be regarded as more or less of a guess. Documents, discovered in the Emperor's Palace which was looted, state the population of China proper to be 413,000,000, and including the outlying possessions 450,000,000.

That portion of Dr. Rennie's book which refers to Japan is interesting and even valuable, as throwing light on the Japanese character, but it, like all others that have been published, contains far less information than the old work by Kempfer; it is however eminently readable from the intelligent power of observation possessed by the writer, and his light cheerful style, and the absence of inferences drawn from imperfectly understood facts, which gave rise to so many erroneous conclusions respecting Japanese customs and manners when the first accounts of recent times concerning this interesting people reached England. The account he gives of the nature of the soil on which Yokohama is built, and of the country surrounding it is of interest in these days, when we are endeavouring by all the means in our power to ascertain the influence which food, air, and water respectively exercise on public health generally, and especially in producing that dreadful scourge

of our Indian army-cholera. The land on which the town stands is part of a reclaimed swamp, and according to the opinion generally held of such localities, fever and ague ought to abound there; yet this is not the case, the inhabitants are as healthy as in places where there is no such miasma as must arise from the land about it, strengthened as it is by the exhalations from the heaps of decaying vegetable matter and filth which abound in that part of the town occupied by the Japanese. Visitations of cholera are as rare there as anywhere, and this and other observations made in widely separated countries induces him to think that this mysterious malady is produced in certain constitutions by the electrical condition of the atmosphere. Several instances are given in support of this view, but they will not be sufficient to convince anybody holding a different opinion. We are disposed to attach more weight to his advice with respect to the occupation of our army in India, believing as we do that compelling the men to turn out, just as they have dropped into a sound sleep, and then, letting them lounge about and doze nearly the whole day, too listless even to kill time, but preferring, like the freed slave, to let it kill itself, cannot but lower his stamina so as to render him susceptible to disease. The author appears to hold the same opinion that we have expressed more than once on the subject of the employment of our troops in the East. He does not think that mere exposure to the sun would be injurious if the head were properly protected, nor do we, especially if the skin be kept thoroughly clean so as to allow the perspiration to pass off freely. He also takes occasion in speaking of his visit to a Japanese barracks, in the rooms of which squads of men were learning the manual and platoon exercise, to advocate the introduction of the system into Indian barracks, to which he would also add "judging distance" practice, a very necessary exercise in these days when we use arms of precision only, which are not very precise in their aim, however, in the hands of some of our troops. In speaking of one of the actions in China he mentions an instance in which a body of Tartar cavalry, who were standing motionless about four hundred yards off, received a volley from our Enfields without one of them being damaged thereby.

From the statements in the work before us we may derive ample justification for the destruction of the forts in the Straits of Simonosaki; and we may be sure that there is no exaggeration in these statements, for the opinions held by Dr. Rennie with respect to the manner in which we ought to judge and make allowance for the difference of manners among Easterns are those of a thoughtful christian gentleman, and are therefore utterly devoid of that arrogant spirit which causes so many Europeans to regard everything that is not in accordance with what they have been accustomed to as matter for derision. Firing on foreign vessels of whatever nationality was a matter of frequent occurrence, and it