With Trinculo we exclaimed, "What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive?" Who or what were Typee and Omoo? Were things or creatures thus designated? Did they exist on the earth, or in the air, or in the waters under the earth; were they spiritual or material, vegetable or mineral, brute or human? Were they newly-discovered planets, nicknamed whilst awaiting baptism, or strange fossils, contemporaries of the Megatherium, or Magyar dissyllables from Dr Bowring's vocabulary? Perchance they were a pair of new singers for the Garden, or a fresh brace of beasts for the legitimate drama at Drury. Omoo might be the heavy elephant; Typee the light-comedy camel. Did danger lurk in the enigmatical words? Were they obscure intimations of treasonable designs, Swing advertisements, or masonic signs? Was the palace at Westminster in peril? had an agent of sure of Barbarossa Joinville undermined the Trafalgar column? Were they conspirators' watchwords, lovers' letters, signals concerted between the robbers of Rogers's bank? We tried them anagrammatically, but in vain: there was nought to be made of Omoo; shake it as we would, the O's came uppermost; and by reversing Typee we obtained but a pitiful result. At last a bright gleam broke through the mist of conjecture. Omoo was a book. The outlandish title that had perplexed us was intended to perplex; it was a bait thrown out to that wide-mouthed fish, the public; a specimen of what is theatrically styled _gag_. Having but an indifferent opinion of books ushered into existence by such charlatanical manoeuvres, we thought no more of Omoo, until, musing the other day over our matutinal hyson, the volume itself was laid before us, and we suddenly found ourselves in the entertaining society of Marquesan Melville, the phoenix of modern voyagers, sprung, it would seem, from the mingled ashes of Captain Cook and Robin Crusoe.