Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/420

414 This flotsam and jetsam of the literary past, drifted on to the upper shelves and into out-of-the-way places, may yield some bit of treasure—some record vivid with the life of old days and of places long since blotted out.

Among such driftwood is occasionally to be found a rare fragment of Americana—the "Travels into North America," by Peter Kalm, It is a quaint old book with the observations and reflections of an inquisitive naturalist who visited this country in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is no attempt at style or literary finish of any sort—it is the plain narrative of a man whose interests were by no means confined to natural history. The book is charming in the desultory treatment of its subject matter—in its utter lack of logical arrangement. In one place we read of "cyder" making, and in the very next paragraph the author abruptly launches forth in a dissertation on "a certain quadruped which is pretty common, not only in Pensylvania, but likewise in other provinces, both of South and North America, and goes by the name of Polecat among the English. In New York they generally call it Skunk." In another place some peculiarity in the marriage "of widows is followed by a dissertation on divers remedies used against the toothache.

Kalm was omnivorous as to facts. He meant to tell everything about the new country, and sets this forth in the following remarkable title—

TRAVELS INTO NORTH AMERICA; CONTAINING ITS NATURAL HISTORY, AND

A circumstantial Account of its Plantations and Agriculture in general,

WITH THE CIVIL, ECCLESIASTICAL AND COMMERCIAL STATE OF THE COUNTRY,

The MANNERS of the INHABITANTS, and several curious and IMPORTANT REMARKS on various Subjects.

A perusal of the book fully justifies this title. One is convinced that "no circumstance interesting to natural history or to any other part of literature has been omitted." The book was first published at Stockholm in 1753 under the title "En Resa Til Norra America," and it was subsequently translated into both German and English. The English translation, edited by the naturalist, John Reinhold Forster, was first published at London in 1772, in three volumes, and is dedicated to the Hon. Daines Barrington, the same to whom Gilbert White of Selborne addressed so many of his letters.

Kalm, who held the position of "Professor of Œconomy in the