GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 363 



in bringing out clearly the important contributions to earth-science made 

 by one whose name has seldom been heard in this generation — Jean 

 Etienne Guettard, author of "a new application of geography " and of 

 the earliest known geologic map, one of the first to describe appreci- 

 atively the work of rain and rivers in modifying geographic features and 

 to accurately note the geographic distribution of fossils, first discoverer 

 of the volcanic origin of the extinct craters of central France. Passing 

 thence to Werner and to Hutton (and his interpreter, Playfair) with 

 their rival "theories of the earth," he proceeds to parcel credit duly to 

 d'Archiac, Barrande, von Buch, Buckland, Cuvier, Darwin, De laBeche, 

 Sir James Hall, L}'ell, Murchison, de Saussure, Sedgwick, William Smith, 

 and a score of less known makers of the science ; his treatment being 

 the more satisfactory to geographers by reason of his own full apprecia- 

 tion of modern physical geography— the New Geology. American read- 

 ers may find the work incomplete at first blush by reason of the omission 

 of such names as those of our own Hall, the principal author of the 

 "New York system," of Hilgard, the prophet of southern geology, and 

 of Powell, the discoverer of the baselevel and thus the founder of phy- 

 siography ; but further reading will reveal the author's policy of avoid- 

 ing characterization of the work of living leaders. Sir Archibald's style 

 is simple and clear and the book-making is admirable; so the treatise is 

 easy reading, while its substance is made accessible by a full index. 



W J M. 



Java, the Garden of the East. By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, Author of 

 Jinrikisha Days in Japan. Pp. 339, with illustrations. New York : 

 The Century Company. 1897. $1.50. 

 Fastidious readers are indebted to the Century Company for some three 

 hundred and fifty pages of as artistic book-making as the j^ear has seen — 

 artistic in typography and paper, artistic in illustration, and still more 

 artistic (though this is but the publishers' good fortune) in literary form 

 and content— and the book is no less instructive than artistic. Td- 



w^ard the end of the fifteenth century the spirit of conquest awoke from 

 its long sleep of the dark ages, and first Iberia and then Netherland 

 entered on careers of exploration and colonization. All men took note 

 of the Spanish conquests, partly because they included a New World ; 

 but somehow the less brilliant moves of the Dutcb on the world's checker- 

 board have not been followed with equal attention— at least by English- 

 speaking peoples. So Batavia has long been half recognized through the 

 mists of a provincial language as some sort of contributor toward the 

 solid wealth of Amsterdam and 's Gravenhage (reduced by us, in self- 

 defense, to The Hague), while Java was still more vaguely glimpsed as 

 the coffee plantation of the Dutch East India Company. True, there 

 is a rich literature grown out of the Dutch conquest and colonization, in 

 which Java and its capital city are faithfully pictured in all their stages 

 of growth since the first vessels from Holland reached them about 1590; 

 true, special students of geography and of trade interests are familiar 

 with these records in the language of the Lowlands ; yet to the mass of 

 intelligent people the scant information gleaned through the alien litera- 



