British New Guinea¹

Abstract

MR. THOMSON'S work on British New Guinea has been looked for with some impatience. Now that it has come it falls short of our expectations. We had hoped for a comprehensive work marshalling into order and summarising the observations and investigations made in the British part of New Guinea, by so many missionaries, explorers, navaland government officers and scientific men, for many years. instead of this we find that he book is made up almost entirely of the explorations during the past four or five years of the administrator, boiled down out of the official reports by Mr. J. Thomson, the secretary of the Queensland branch of the Geographical Society of Australasia. Throughout the volume there is everywhere evidence that its author is new to literary composition. In consequence, the terse and vigorous English of the original reports suffers severely in the process, so much so that we regret that their important parts have not been presented to us as extracts in the explorer's own words. Mr. Thomson has himself never visited New Guinea, if we may judge by internal evidence although his phraseology in many places is not unlikely to lead the reader to suppose that he has had a share in the results presented in its pages. Had the author had some personal acquaintance with the country of which he writes he would have formed opinions, we believe, different from many of those he has expressed on his own account throughout the book.