Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/937

Rh smiling at the smallness of the achievements which, he is ahle to chronicle at the end of the nineteenth century. The volume is well illustrated and printed, but lacks an index.

As "down East" recedes before him who journeys toward the rising, so does "out West" elude him who follows the setting-sun. The district long-known as the West is east of the present geographical center of the United States, and the name must now be applied to a region far beyond. In order to preserve a knowledge of the real West a series of books under the general title of The Story of the West has been planned by Mr. Ripley Hitchcock, which will present the typical characters who made the life of this wonderful region what it was. It is fairly safe now to locate the West, for the Pacific Ocean forms a barrier which it can not pass. Eastward Mr. Hitchcock places its limit at the Missouri River. The first book of the series is devoted to the aboriginal inhabitant. Its prime object is to show to the reader the Indian's daily life. As the editor of the series truly says: "Mr. Grinnell takes us directly to the camp fire and the council. He shows the Indian as a man subject to like passions and infirmities with ourselves. He shows us how the Indian wooed and fought, how he hunted and prayed, how he ate and slept in short, we are admitted to the real life of the red man, and as we learn to know him we discard two familiar images: the red man of the would-be philanthropic sentimentalist, and the raw-head-and-bloody -bones figure that has whooped through so many pages of fiction." Mr. Grinnell's style is far removed from that of the dry-as-dust piler-up of facts. For vividness and movement his book is well termed a "story," but it gives a much more realizing sense of the Indian's ways than half a dozen tales of Indian adventure of equal length. Thus, in telling about the Indian 's recreations, it describes the scene in and about a camp on a day when no serious work is in hand, giving the amusements of the men, the women, the boys, and the younger children, even down to the mischief of whacking the sleeping dogs. In telling of his war customs. Left Hand or Four Bears is followed upon the trail, and tales of battle told to the author by Indians are freely used. The same method is followed in describing the red man's home life, modes of subsistence, marriage customs, hunting, religion, etc. There is also an interesting chapter showing how the Indians were impressed by the coming of the white man, and in an appendix the distribution of the Indian tribes of North America is set forth. It will thus be seen that the book has no small anthropological value. The volume is fully illustrated and is attractively printed and bound. Future volumes in the same series may be expected to depict the life of the explorer, the soldier, the miner, the trapper, the cowboy, and perhaps other characteristic western types.

Percival Lowell, who once told us about An Unexplored Corner of Japan, now has something to tell about a still less explored region. He has been making a polar expedition and other explorations on Mars, not quite at the usual long range, for his observations were made during ten