get our fill of without going to Palestine. He is too full of the real situation to turn to fanciful imaginations, and as a consequence he gives us the best companion to the Bible which we know of. The critical results of his journey are small, but as a careful summary of what others have finally settled upon his work is authentic. A large number of engravings, of the best execution, bring the landscape and buildings vividly before us. Many of them are from Dr. Ridgaway's sketches, others from photographs, and the only fault we have to find is the omission of titles to them, an omission which is artistic, but inconvenient. --Lieutenant Ruffner[16] does not give a very assuring picture of New Mexico, considered as a possible State in our Union. It has never prospered; its population and area of cultivated land being smaller now than three hundred years ago. As these changes are no doubt due to the operation of natural causes, about which scientific men do not agree, the immediate future of the country does not appear very flattering. Wide as the spread of westward migration has been, it has hardly affected New Mexico. Lieutenant Ruffner says: "The line once crossed, a foreign country is entered. Foreign faces and a foreign tongue are encountered." For twenty-six years the Territory has formed a part of our country, but in that time our civilization has hardly made an impression upon it. The author, without directly saying so, seems to regard the scheme for making it a State with disfavor, and his readers will agree with him. He has done his country a service by this painstaking and impartial description of a region which few but army officers know anything about.