361 of this Journal.
The title of the pamphlet alluded to is, _An Account of Wolves
nurturing Children in their Dens_. By an Indian Official. Plymouth:
Jenkin Thomas, printer. 1852.

THE LITERATURE OF PARLIAMENT.

The Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, in addition to
its other varied and important functions, fulfils, through one of its
branches, that of a great national book manufactory. Every session,
the House of Commons issues a whole library of valuable works,
containing information of the most ample and searching kind on
subjects of a very miscellaneous character. These are the Blue-books,
of which everybody has heard: many jokes are extant as to their
imposing bulk and great weight, literally and figuratively; and a
generation eminently addicted to light reading, may well look with
horror on these thick and closely-printed folios. But, in truth, they
are not for the mere _reader_: they are for the historian, and student
of any given subject; they are storehouses of material, not digested
treatises. True it is, that their great size sometimes defeats its
object--the valuable portion of the material is sometimes buried under
the comparatively worthless heap that surrounds it--the golden grains
lost amid the chaff. But in a case of this kind, the error of
redundancy is one on the safe side; let a subject in all its bearings
be thoroughly and fully brought up, and it is the fault or failing of
him who sets about the study of it, if he is appalled at the amount of
information on which he has to work, or cannot discriminate and seize
upon the salient points, or on those which are necessary for his own
special purposes.

Few persons, we believe, who have not had occasion to consult these
parliamentary volumes in a systematic manner, are at all aware of the
immense labour that is bestowed upon them, and the care and
completeness with which they are compiled and arranged. Indeed, we
daresay few readers have any accurate notions of the actual number of
parliamentary papers annually issued, or of the nature of their
contents. From even a very cursory examination of the literary result
of a parliamentary session, the previously uninformed investigator
could not fail to rise with a greatly augmented estimate of the
functions of the great ruling body of the state--the guarding and
directing power in the multitudinous affairs of the British Empire--an
empire that extends over every possible variety of