The sun. [volume], October 05, 1919, Section 6 Books and the Book World, Page 6, Image 70

About The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1916-1920

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Books and the Book. World of The Sun, October 5, 1919.
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BOOKS AND THE BOOK WORLD
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1919.
THE CALF-BOY.
By Francis Carlin.
J'-plS pleasant here to be herding ealvo
A And they on the upland grasses
For the beetle's tune Is trailed across
The -winds in the mountain passes;
And the crickets sing when the day is done,
(As they do be singing nightly, -On
hills that seem like the hearth of the sun
"While the clouds are flaming brightly.
But I wish the heifers were brave and strong
And they in the valley's clover,
And I to be going off to the fields
"With the tea and the crows and Rover;
For all the cows on the grass in the glen
Are out on their own resources,
And I would be listening once again
To the voices of men with horses.
Copyright, 1919, by Francis Carlin.
SECTIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY
THE arrival of ten more of tho fifty volumes
which are called The Chronicles of America
and which the Yale University Press is publishing
is calculated to make you sit up late in front of the
fireplace.
"With these ten, thirty of the fifty volumes are
published. Each book is complete in itself, but all
fifty interlock in aji elaborate treatment of almost
every aspect of American history. The books are
not scholar texts, though scholarship is their
firm foundation. They arc highly readable, and
often intensely interesting, narratives. They do, in
the main, combine the excitement of good stories
well told with the worth of important knowledge
properly presented.
Of the ten volumes just out one is the first of
the sequence of fifty The Red Man's Continent,
by Ellsworth Huntington. Mr. Huntington is
a specialist on climate and its influence in human
history. He starts on the lawn of Hampton Insti
tute, where you may sec perfectly representative
specimens of three of the world's races the Ameri
can Indian, the negro and the white. He finishes
with the conclusion that "in our own day the dis
tribution of culture in America meaning the two
continents is more closely related to climatic
energy than to any other factor." Here are 172
pages devoted to a popular exposition of those
physical conditions M'hichwe'are told, have shaped
the whole course of civilization by compelling or
coaxing men to migrate from one region to another.
How did men first get to the American continents ?
."Why arc the "Western prairies treeless! Can man
make any spot, short of the poles, habitable as
our achievement at Panama might suggest? These
question and many others like them are answered
by Mr. Huntington.
"We were struck, on page 19 of Sydney G.
Fisher's account of The Quaker Colonies, with the
enthusiasm of "William Penn in 1682-83 for the
neighborhood of Philadelphia. "Oh, how sweet 1"
exclaimed the eminent Quaker, "is the quiet of
these parts, freed from the anxious and -troublesome
solicitations, hurries and perplexities of woful
Europe." About 235 years later Penn would not
liave said this. The quiet of those parts was serf
ously impaired by a haste to build, at the urgent
solicitation of woful Europe, ships to a number
exceeding the fifty sail which, Penn reported, had
arrived within a year. On page 45 we gleaned in
formation about the people called the Pennsylvania '
Dutch. "Agents. c"alled 'newlanders' and 'soul
sellers travelled through Germany working up the
Jransatlantic traffic by various devices, some of
them," adds Mr. Fisher "not altogether credit
able." New Jersey began as New Casarca, at least"
the difficulty pf translating New .Terse- into the.
Latin required for legal documents was circum
vented by calling it that, The author tells us, in
speaking of New Jersey ttlers, that some families,
it is said, can be traced steadily proceeding south
ward as they stripped off the forest and started
sawmills and :rihtinills. The Swedes who had an
early start in Delaware might have had seme effect
on the later history of that State if Gustavus Adol
phus hadn't jumped into the Thirty Years' War.
But tho Swedes were not, then and there at. least,
colonizers.
Charles 2L Andrews's. Colonial Folkways ).?,
full of the kinds of people who came to Ameriea,
the lives they lived in town and country, the houses
they built, their clothes and habits, their efforts to
think or not to think, their religions. We are pleas
antly convinced that it took all kinds of people to
mate a New "World (which may, after all, be not
yet entirely or satisfactorily completed) ; that
Councilman Caeteb, who owned 60,000 Virginia
acres. 600 negroes, an "elegant and spacious
house," stock in the Baltimore Iron "Works,kand
several farms, was a man well off; that the Vir
ginia ladies who complained of Philadelphia as a
place of small rooms and houses all alike were un
reasonable; that when Madam Smith declared the
juice of Jerusalem oak had cured all the negro
children on the plantation of a distemper she de
ceived herself; that it must have been hard to live
with lingerie; that people were right in preferring
Madeira wine to Canary vidouia; that Jonathan
Edwards, beginning Latin at six years old, would
have been found by Ramsey Mil-Holland to be as
sickening as a girl ; that a young man like Cutler
who went through Connecticut in 1757 on his way
to acquire a wife was in no condition to notice
,whcther the roads were good or poor.
You"will learn from Edward S. Corwtn, in his
John Marshall and the Constitution, that Mar
silvll's conduct of the trial of Aaron Burr for
treason is the' one serious blemish on Marshall's
judicial record. As the-subtitle of the book indi
cates, this is really A Chronicle of the Supreme
Court, in any account of which Marshall is, of
course, the grand figure. Actually he is in danger
of being displaced, in the mind of the reader, by
the fascinating spectacle of Aaron Burr. Do not
misunderstand the range of this volume, which
stops before the coming of the civil war and nar
rows from history to biography in a later chapter
describing Marshall's closing years, Among
Friends and Neighbors.
Turn to page 35 of Constance Ldidsat Skin
ner's Pioneers of the Old Southwest if you want
to know how the log cabin was built, without nails or
glass for windows. Figures of f rontiersmcn traders
and warriors move thickly through these pages.
But of course the great pageant of the book has its
.dominant figure; he is Daniel Boone. Boone mar
ried Rebecca Bryan in 1756. For tenycars, from
1764 onward, Boone and his son James were com
rades in the wilderness. 'In the cold nights of the
open camp, as DANnx.and James lay under the
frosty stars, the father kept the boy warm snug
gled to his breast under the broad flap of his hunt
ing shirt." At 17 James was killed by an Indian
tomahawk as his father was leading the first set
tlers toward Kentucky. It was in 1799, when he
was far from young, that the father set out for the
unknown country of Missouri. The place, he de
clared, was getting too crowded; for his part he
needed more elbow room.
v '
THE BEST. OF THEIR KIND.
Afare Nostrum (Our Sea), by Vicente Blasco
Ibanez. German submarine warfare in the
Mediterranean. A novel as tremendous as
his The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
CIjp librarian s (Enrnw
CONDUCTED BY
FRANK PARKER STOCKBRIDGE.
The Ofd Madhouse, by William De Morgan.
Lasting charm, and a mystery story so fine
that even Mrs. De Morgan's- final chapter
cannot spoil it.
Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children,
edited by Joseph Bucklin Bishop. An irre
sistible revelation of the man. The best
book for readers of all ages.
The Command Is Forward, by Alexander
Woollcott. Superb stories of the A. E. F.,
colected from Hhe pages of the Stars and
Stripes.
From the Life, by Harvey O'Higgins. Fic
tional biography. Material at times like
O. Henry's. Some capital stories.
A Woman's Woman, by Nalbro Bartley. An
American family from 1901 to 1918. More
truth than exaggeration. '
Ramsey Milholland. by Booth Tarkington. An
American . boyhood" matured into manhood
by the events of 1917-18
The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset
Maugham. Candid novel of a genius. "There
are few men to whom Jove is the most im
portant thing in the world, and they are
not very interesting ones."
Mary Olivier; A Life, by May Sinclair. For
those to ;whom introspection and memory
are the breath of life.
TJio Story of a Lover. Anonymous. For those
who care for beautiful prose and honest
candor and, who can forgive human nature.
The Young: Visiters, by Daisy Ash ford. A
nine-yea rWs novel of a social climber.
The Re-Creation of Brian Kent, by Harold Bell
Wright.' For those who enjoyed the author's
other- hooks.
JACKDAWS IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES.
CENSORSHIP of opinion is at all times and
under all circumstances intolerable some
thing to be defied, resisted and defeated by every
available means. Censorship of facts is something
else again.
Honest persons can have only sympathy for every
honest and intelligent effort to check the dissemina
tion of falsehood and misinformation, nor need this
attitude imply agreement or even sympathy with
every effort to promulgate any given set. of truthful
facts. One may honestly believe the world or any
part of its people would be better off for not know
ing some facts. No one, however, can honestly be-
licve "that any good purpose is served by the pro
mulgator of untruth.
Yet that is precisely what is going ou, unchecked,
tolerated, even indorsed, through the medium of
great numbers of books issued by reputable pub
lishers, circulated freely by the public libraries and
bought in great numbers by loving parents for the
education and edification of their young.
Did you ever study the colored pictures of ani
mals, birds and flowers in any of the popular
"nature" books?
Gerrymandering the Gallumpus.
Let a naturalist write that the Kingtailed Gal
lumpus has three vertical parallel peagrcen stripes
on his nose, when everybody who has ever talked
with a traveller who has returned with his life
from the vasty solitudes of Baffin's Land, where
the Gallumpus has his habitat and pursues his prey,
knows that tho two outer stripes diverge from the
median one at an angle of two degrees, thus being
parallel, if at all, in a strictly non-Euclidean sense,
while these outer stripes, to the observing eye, are
not pcagreen in any real sense, but a color some
where between olive green and Nile green, much
more nearly matching the familiar string bean in
tone than its aristocratic cousin, the pea let, I say,
pausing for breath, a naturalist venture an asser
tion so divergent from fact as the example just
cited and there will immediately pounce upon his
unsuspecting and unprotected neck a score or more
of his fellow naturalists, with whom the term "na
ture faker" is one of the mildest epithets in their
battery of denunciation and abuse.
Falsification of the facts as to the parallclity or
the peagreenness of the facial stripes of the Gal
lumpus must not be tolerated. All honest person
must sympathize with such efforts to suppress the"
lie and its vendor. But what is to be said of a pub
lic or a public librarian that will strain at the
pcagreen stripes of a Gallumpus and swallow a full
set of red stripes on a chipmunk ?
""Why do yon represent the cedar waxwing in .
the colors that belong to the Baltimore oriole, or
thereabouts?" I asked the publisher of one of fEe
popular nature books last summer.
lie explained that they had been having trouble
with the ink, due to the shortage of dyestuffs, or
somctliing equally impertinent. It did not seem to
occur to him that the responsibility of the printer
was at least as great as that of the author equaL,
in fact, to that of the artist. ,.
Let Blackbirds Be Black.
For it is through pictures chiefly and through
the printed word very slightly that those who get
their nature lore from books acquire whatever they
get. The author has a fairly free hand ; if he is not
sure of a fact he iriay omit it. His description of
an animal or a bird may go no farther than tho
most salient points, but th artist must picture tho
whole of his subject. The author may focus all of
his rhetoric upon the peacock's gorgeous tail, but
the artist mast no more draw a tail without a pea
cock than he would a peacock without a tail.
It is easier to describe than to painr'thc purples
and greens that make the plumage of the Eastern
bjackbfrd one of .the most beautiful things in
nature. But what city child who does not know the
blackbird can get a true impression of it if the
printer lies by mixing too much purple or green in
his inks? I saw such a-picture not long ago; it
represented a blackbird as it might have looked
after bathing in a pot of violet ink!
A censorship that would pass on the accuracy of
the pictures in the constantly growing output of
nature books (and of each new edition for which
the printer has mixed his inks afresh) would
eventually help in removing the popular distrust
of information obtained fronTbooks. ..a,..;