BOOK REVIEWS 



Edited by Marion Randall Parsons 



"Travels in Whatever in the future may be given to the world of the 

 Alaska"* journals and other unpublished writings of John Muir, 

 nothing is likely to come to us more alight with his person- 

 ality than are the two volumes published since his death. They bear an 

 interesting relationship to one another, for not only doi the Letters end 

 just as he Avas embarking on the first of the journeys recorded in Travels 

 in Alaska, but the latter book, the last to leave his hands, is still ex- 

 pressive of the ideals and enthusiasms of the young John Muir so vividly 

 revealed to us in the letters. It is not often given to a man to have lived 

 his life with such singleness of purpose, nor at three-score years and ten 

 to have so completely fulfilled the aims and ideals of his youth. 



Travels in Alaska is a record of three journeys of exploration by 

 canoe and afoot among the fiords and mountains of Southeastern Alas- 

 ka. Although prospectors, traders and a handful of missionaries were 

 scattered among the islands, and were beginning to push up the great 

 river valleys, the greater part of Alaska was in 1879 still unexplored, its 

 fiords uncharted since Vancouver's day. With Fort Wrangell as his base, 

 Mr. Muir made several short steamer trips, which gave him the op- 

 portunity to learn something of the glaciers and forests of the vicinity. 

 After his return from an extended trip up the Stickeen River in October, 

 he set out with Mr. Young, a Wrangell missionary, and a crew of Indian 

 canoemen, to visit the fiords to northward, near the country of the war- 

 like Chilcat tribes. Their eventful journey culminated in the discovery of 

 Glacier Bay and its glorious company of glaciers, the largest of which 

 bears Mr. Muir's name. The following year he continued his explorations, 

 particularly in the region of Sum Dum Bay and the Taku Fiord, and in 

 1890 returned a third time to the Muir Glacier for a more extended ex- 

 ploration of its upper fields and study of its flow. 



Today, a generation after the journals were written that are the basis 

 of this book, it is easy to under-rate Mr. Muir's great service to science. 

 He was the first American geologist to grasp the extent and scope of the 

 glacial phenomena of our continent. Others have followed in the paths of 

 research that he pioneered, and have laid before the world the truths he 

 was the first to recognize. "Many detailed proof-facts will be required to 

 compel the assent to this in the minds of most geologists . . . but the 

 glacial millennium will come." In this, as in many another passage of the 

 original journal, omitted in the book, one may read Mr. Muir's quiet 



* Travels in Alaska. By John Muir. Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston and 

 New York, 1915. Price, $2.50, 



