Extracts from the last Edinburgh Review.

"Mr. Lewis Burckhardt was a young Swiss, employed by the African Association to make discoveries in that country. He is recently dead; and the society are now publishing the result of his labours. Thoroughly aware that a great part of the failures of African discoveries proceeded from their want of previous education in the customs, manners, and languages of the east, Mr. Burckhardt prepared himself, by the study of Arabic, by a residence of six years in Syria and Egypt, by journies in Nubia, Palestine, in Arabia, and in the countries between Egypt and the Red sea, for his great purpose of penetrating into the heart of Africa. His knowledge of Arabic and the Koran, were so great, that after the severest examination by doctors of the Mohammedan law, appointed for that express purpose by Mohammed Ali, pacha of Egypt, he was pronounced to be not only a real, but a very learned Mohammedan. But as his skill in oriental manners and languages improved, his constitution became impaired; and he became as last the victim of a tour in Arabia: dying better qualified than any traveller hitherto employed by the association for the purpose of discovery in Africa."

"Some of his excursions were very unfortunate—twice, in spite of solemn bargains with shekhs and high blooded Arabs, he is deserted and pillaged in the desert. In one of these instances, the robbers leave him nothing but his breeches. These he thought tolerably secure; but he was not yet sufficiently acquainted with the manners and customs of the east. A female Arab met him with these breeches; and a very serious conflict for them ensued between the parties. The association have not stated the result.

"We are much struck by the perpetual miseries to which this traveller is subjected. In all his journies, he seems kick'd and cuff'd by the whole party, and subjected to the grossest contempt and derision, for the appearance of poverty he always thought it prudent to assume. His system was, that the less display of wealth a man makes in the east the safer he is. This may be true enough in general; but when he travelled with a caravan containing merchants who had ten or twelve camels, and twenty or thirty slaves each, he might surely have ventured on the display of one camel, and one or two slaves; for in one journey he travels upon an ass, without a slave; and in consequence his own wood to cut, his water skins to fill, and his supper to dress. He receives as much respect, therefore, as a man would do who was to rub down his own horse in England; and is well nigh overpowered by the great and unnecessary fatigues to which this violent economy subjects him. We do not remember that other travellers in Africa, proceeding with caravans, have found it necessary to affect such an extreme state of pauperism; and Mr. Burckhardt himself admits, that Ali Bey, the pretended Arabian, penetrated every where in the east by the very opposite system of magnificence and profusion, even though he was suspected not to be a Mussulman by the natives themselves."

"In his visit to the peninsula of Mount Sinai, Mr. Burckhardt meets with a substance which he considers to be the same as the manna mentioned in the books of Moses.

"'A botanist would find a rich harvest in these high regions, in the most elevated parts of which, a variety of sweet scented herbs grow. The Bedouins collect to this day the manna, under the very same circumstances described in the books of Moses. Whenever the rains have been plentiful during the winter, it drops abundantly from the tamarisk (in Arabic, Tarfa;) a tree very common in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, but producing, as far as I know, no manna any where else. They gather it before sunrise, because, if left in the sun it melts; its taste is very sweet, much resembling honey; they use it as we do sugar, principally in their dishes composed of flour. When purified over the fire, it keeps for many months; the quantity collected is inconsiderable, because it is exclusively the produce of the Tarfa, which tree is met with only in a few vallies at the foot of the highest granite chain. The inhabitants of the peninsula, amounting to almost four thousand, complain of the want of rain and of pasturage; the state of the country must therefore be much altered from what it was in the time of Moses, when all the tribes of Beni Israel found food here for their cattle.'"