fiction of Margaret Collier Graham, Flora H. Loughead, and for the greater portion of the work produced by the state's rather formidable list of prose writers. While all this display of local color may seem too apparent an effort on the part of Californians to place upon their work the stamp of a definite locality, and may be considered by some a cheap form of art, it is this very sensitiveness to the beauty and grandeur with which Nature has clothed the West that offers the greatest promise of its rapid literary advancement, a sensitiveness, moreover, that will become more and more acute with the cultivation of the higher faculties through increasing educational growth.

The provincial spirit has dominated the nation's literature since its earliest history. Sectional studies have been possible only in a country of such immensity where conditions are not merely subject to constant change, but where they differ so radically with varying localities. Yet each of these delineations of the many phases of our complex life and character contributes something to our literature as a whole. As to the nature of California's future offerings, I may best point to one who illustrates the growing tendency of the West toward breadth and vigor in fiction, Mr. Jack London. This enthusiastic young Californian, whose imagination was set aglow by civilization's conquest of Alaskan wilds, and whose study window looks down upon the waters of San Francisco Bay, has exhibited a freshness and spontaneity of expression, a freedom from academic precision and restraint, that give to his pictures the quality of work done at first hand. The creative ability displayed by Mr. London is a most encouraging sign, indicative of the prevalent desire among the majority of Western writers to avoid what the author of The Son of the Wolf defines as "the musty grip of the Past," -to get clean away from ancient restrictions and stereotyped forms. "I do not

want to write literature; I want to write life," said Frank Norris early in his career, voicing the sentiment of those who prefer to look at the world through their own eyes, rather than to accept with faith the views of men whose crumbling tombs mark the highway of the centuries.

To what extent the splendor and majesty of the West may favor the growth of a peculiarly distinctive literature is altogether speculative, but if we are to be guided in our forecast by the history of other lands, we may assume with some degree of certainty that this beauty and sublimity of landscape will ultimately make itself manifest in a greater breadth of canvas, a bolder stroke, and in the more varied and brilliant coloring of a lavish brush. To select first-hand material, and to fashion it after his own pattern, rather than after that of the conventional size, which requires a certain technical finish, and concerns itself with the details of workmanship, will be the aim of the artist of the future. The tendency of California writers is toward ruggedness and strength, and if the work of either London or Norris may offer a significant hint of what the coming novelist of the West will strive to attain, I should say first of all-force and originality, the art of prose expression that shall not be a weak imitation of those mouldy, yet revered models of antiquity known as the classics.

The West is rich in literary material. There are mountain ranges comparatively unexplored, which aboriginal tradition veils in haunting mystery. The struggles, trials, and heroism of the early pioneers have scarcely been touched upon, and what dramatic strength and picturesqueness is contained in this oldtime life of the border! And there exists to-day throughout the length and breadth of the Pacific Coast a peculiarly fascinating freedom not easily comprehended by those who have known nothing but the restraints of an older and more conven

THE fourteenth volume of the Silva of North America,' just published, brings a great book, begun about twenty years ago, to a happy conclusion. The first volume, after eight or ten years of preparation,was issued in 1890, and the work has made steady, enthusiastic progress to the end. It is a description of all the trees that are known to grow naturally in North America, exclusive of Mexico, 585 in number, illustrated by 740 magnificent plates. A truly great book on a great subject by a master, marked by perfect uniformity of treatment in all its parts, well proportioned, evenly balanced, like a broad spreading oak standing in sunshine alone. Though scientific, it is in the best sense popular and thoroughly readable, telling almost everything an intelligent reader or traveler would naturally wish to know about our forests and trees, and a great deal besides that he would never be likely to think of. So full and lifelike are the descriptions and illustrations that treelovers, however slight their training, are enabled to identify all the trees, learn their distribution, productions, uses, and something of their relatives throughout the world, what kind of forests they make, which are most desirable for parks

1 The Silva of North America. By CHARLES SPRAGUE SARGENT. Illustrated by CHARLES

and homes, and which lend themselves most effectively to the wants of the farmer, forester, and landscape gardener.

And, fortunately, the work was completed just when the need of it was the greatest. After centuries of criminal waste and destruction, our forests are beginning to be appreciated, not only as timber and cover for the fountains of irrigating streams, but for higher uses also. Therefore trees are being studied as never before, and knowledge concerning them is called for by an ever widening circle of workers and beauty lovers. The author, Professor Charles Sprague Sargent, has proved himself the man for the work. With singleness of aim and sustaining enthusiasm, he was also blest with wealth and power of dogged application, of putting things through, getting things done. While all his surroundings were drawing him toward a life of fine pleasure, and the cultivation of the family fortune, he chose to live laborious days in God's forests, studying, cultivating the whole continent as his garden. Into this glorious field he set forth rejoicing, making ways everywhere, consuming obstacles, never counting the cost. All his studies were bent toward this EDWARD FAXON. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1890-1902. 14 vols.

book, and with unflagging industry for the last twenty years he has labored to make it complete, traveling, studying, writing, determined to see every tree on the continent, known or unknown, grow ing with its companions in its own native home. And, with few exceptions, he has thus seen them all, most of them in the different seasons of the year, in leaf, and flower, and fruit, or disrobed at rest in winter. His task seemed endless, but glowing enthusiasm carried him on. Flitting from side to side of the continent, he was now in Florida, now in Canada, California, Alaska; traveling thousands of miles every year, mostly by rail of course, but long distances by canoe or sailboat on the Florida coast, through swamps, along lagoons, and from one palmy island to another, jolting in wagons or on horseback over the plains and deserts and mountain chains of the West, now tracing the ways of early adventurers, to identify the trees they first described, now exploring untrodden wildernesses, like Charity enduring all things, weather, hunger, squalor, hardships, the extent and variety of which only those who from time to time were his companions can begin to appreciate. While trees were waving and fluttering about him, telling their stories, all else was forgotten. Love made everything light. He thought nothing of crossing the continent to study a single tree in its varied forms, as influenced by soil, climate, companions, etc. Several trips were made to Florida to find a certain species of Palm in flower and fruit. Practically the whole book is based on personal investigation and study in the field, though a great deal of herbarium and library work was done both in our own and in foreign countries, in searching for and studying type specimens of our trees and their early literature, in trying to clear up confused nomenclature.

At the first glance through the book, every one must admire the fullness and beauty of the plates. They were made

in Paris, from drawings from life, by Faxon, the foremost botanical artist in America. They show a branchlet of each species, with leaves, flowers, and fruit, almost all of natural size, and sections of leaves, seeds, fruit, stamens, pistils, etc., enlarged. And these are 80 tellingly drawn and arranged, any one with the slightest smattering of botany is enabled to identify each tree, even without referring to the text. The descriptions, however, seem rather dry and encyclopædic until we get used to them.

When the first volume was published, it was believed that all our trees could be described in twelve volumes, but during the progress of the work new discoveries caused an overflow into a thirteenth and again into a fourteenth. A fourteenvolume, three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar book on botany may well seem formidable to common mortals, but it is not oversized or dear for the country it covers, - all the forests of America and sketches of the lives of the adventurous explorers and naturalists who first saw and described them, and sketches of all the main features of the scenery. If any tree-book deserves to be big, this onea continent among island books, a Sequoia among firs and pines-does. And though accustomed to read the trees themselves, not written descriptions of them, I have read it through twice, as if it were a novel, and wished it were longer. The technical parts are scientific enough, and dry enough for the taste and uses of the most exacting botanist. These dry parts, however, are comparatively small, like mere patches of gravel or sand in a fertile wilderness, and you soon learn to see the living trees through the midst of them, waving and swirling in the weather. The first page of most of the descriptions is fairly loaded with synonyms, and however useful they may be in the present condition of the leafy science, one cannot help begrudging the extravagant amount of good wood pulp and type they consume, and the labor spent

in digging and dragging the dead ones out of their graves. Some poor trees seem to have more names than branches. Instead of bestowing so much consider ate hospitality on these rapidly increasing name-cairns, and proudly putting them on show in the best places throughout the book, they might, with advantage to readers, have been shoved together back of the index, as a sort of terminal moraine, for the use of systematists, or bravely omitted altogether. Linnæus consigned many names to oblivion, and surely in these busy days we may begin to expect the arrival of another master, able to help us to forget what must be forgotten.

Though joyfully welcoming each new tree, Professor Sargent never gave way to the prevailing tendency to exaggerate the number of species, by exalting the value of trifling, shifting, accidental characters; while his masterly terminology renders the definition of the main characters sharp and clear to every mind.

On the vexed question of nomenclature there will of course be no lack of conflicting opinion, for the subject is naturally full of it. Most botanists, however, will probably agree with the author. Some may even thank him for the clearings he has laboriously made through perplexing tangles, though such work is usually anything but thankful. Good rules are often followed without any allowance for changes called for in the progress of the science. To the law of Priority, the author, with most scientific botanists, bows down to the ground, or even a little way into it at times, to the astonishment of spectators standing aside in the groves. Prior names founded on ignorance are held fast and defended against those founded on knowledge. Names that are blunders pure and simple, absurdities, barbarisms of every sort, are maintained for the sake of stability, as if anything or any place in this whirling, on-rushing flood of a world can ever be sufficiently stable for nomenclatorial

Babels. Common mortals, as well as name-dealers, should be considered; for names have to be read and spoken, and jaws and feelings may needlessly be hurt by mongrel, craggy, unpronounceable names in mixed languages, calling sweet, fragrant trees fœtid, or white, black, on account of the namers having seen and smelled only decaying specimens. The law of Priority doubtless tends to keep down the growth of unmanageable nomenclatorial confusion. But in some cases, a too rigid adherence to the letter, instead of to the spirit of the law, prolongs the existence of error, and causes more confusion than it cures; as is strikingly illustrated by the name given to the very first tree described in the book, the noblest of our Magnolias. Linnæus, from specimens of the "deliciously fragrant" flowers, probably in a decaying condition after their long voyage across the sea, named it, in the first edition of his Species Plantarum, Magnolia fœtida, but discovering his mistake, he took occasion to correct it in a later edition, by changing the name to Magnolia grandiflora, by which good name the tree has been known throughout the world for nearly one hundred and forty years. But because the Priority law for species, by general consent of botanists, begins at the date of publication of the first edition, the dead fœtid name, buried by Linnæus himself, is now raised to replace the living one, thus breaking the heart of the law in arithmetical obedience to the letter of it, and causing more confusion in a year than is likely to be put down in a century. Still Stability, Fixity at any price is the cry; and we are gravely told that there is nothing in names anyhow, or ought to be nothing, for sense in scientific names is a confounded bother; while at the same time, the naturalists of every country are trying to put as much as possible into them, and loading them down with meaning. On the other hand, when the difficulties under which nomenclators labor are considered, the clashing of laws and

their various interpretations, the imperfection of the material on which genera and species are often founded, and the immensity of the number of plant people, we may well wonder that the present condition of botanical nomenclature is so good. Nevertheless, like everything else, it must grow better with the advancement of knowledge. The world moves, botany and all; blunders will be corrected, crooked names made straight, rough ones smooth, for neither in heaven nor on earth can error be made immortal. These questions, however, soon cease from troubling, for turning over the broad blossoming pages, we quickly find our selves in the heart of the forests.

Most of our trees were known or partly known and described before this work was commenced. But these descriptions, besides being short and technical, were scattered in many books beyond reach of the general reader. The first book on our trees, as indicated by Professor Sargent, is Marshall's Arbustum Americanum, published in Philadelphia in 1785, which includes an account of 277 trees and shrubs. The next was published in Göttingen in 1787, by F. A. J. von Wangenheim, a Hessian officer in the employ of England, who fought for the king in the war of the Revolution, and with good German thrift and industry found time between battles to study about 168 of our trees and shrubs, chiefly with reference to their value for introduction into the forests of Germany.

Next came André Michaux's classical work, Histoire de Chênes de l'Amerique, published in Paris in 1801, in which twenty species of our eastern Oaks are systematically described and figured.

On many of Michaux's adventurous excursions through the eastern wildernesses during his thirteen years' residence in America as botanical agent for the French government he was accompanied by his son, F. A. Michaux, who afterward wrote the best book on North American trees that had yet appeared.

It was published in Paris in 1810, includes descriptions of 155 trees founded on his own observations in the forests, and is illustrated with beautifully colored plates.

This magnificent work, covering only the trees found east of the Mississippi River and in some parts of western Louisiana, was supplemented in 1842 by three volumes from the pen of the celebrated naturalist, Thomas Nuttall.

A second edition of Nuttall's Supplement was issued with the third reprint of Michaux's Sylva under the general title of The Sylva of North America, the only illustrated descriptive work on North American trees in general which preceded the present Silva.

The above mentioned works and others of less note which followed them covered only sections of the country great or small, like patches of sunlight on a cloudy landscape, while the present work sheds light on nearly all the trees of the continent alike.

66

Many years ago," says Professor Sargent, "when I first realized the difficulty of obtaining any true knowledge of the trees of this country, I formed the plan of writing a Silva which should contain an account of all the species that grow spontaneously in the forests of North America. The books which had been written on this subject related only to the trees of comparatively limited regions, and therefore presented no general or systematic view of the composition of our forests. Such works as existed were long out of date, too, and included none of the information collected by recent explorers and observers, and no account whatever of the trees discovered in late years west of the Mississippi River.

"Many of our trees have never been fully described. All that can be learned about them from books is contained in a few words of purely technical description of little value to the general reader; and these descriptions are widely scattered in American and foreign libraries beyond