Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/117



This exceedingly handsome volume is a supplement to "Mont Pelée and the Tragedy of Martinique," published by Professor Heilprin in 1902. In it the author discusses the peculiar spine or obelisk which was thrust up the throat of Mont Pelee in 1903, rising to a height at times of nearly 85c feet, and which has since entirely disappeared. The series of views of this obelisk taken by Mr Heilprin and published in the volume are remarkably fine. One of them is republished in this Magazine on page 86. Mr Heilprin also publishes several pictures of glass water bottles and wine glasses which show marked deformations of substance without breakage. "There are no indications of glass flow, and the only apparent change that the glass has undergone is an acquired murkiness. The substance had evidently yielded to pressure impacts at a time when it was subjected to and softened by great heat. This condition sufficiently explains the similar condition of objects found at Pompeii, and does away with the necessity of assuming that the deformation was the result of a slow and steadily progressing molecular change whose workings extended through centuries (!)" Mr Heilprin believes that Pompeii was destroyed in very much the same manner as St Pierre and not, as has been generally assumed, by "simple incineration."

This is a real book by a naturalist and explorer of the old type, and from preface to conclusion is full of vivid and sharply drawn pictures. To any one who loves the solitude of the forest or who has felt the charm of the tropical jungle the book must appeal in the same way that Belt's "Naturalist in Nicaragua" or Bates' "Travels on the Amazon" have for many years fired the imagination of the youth of America and England; but to the writer the book has an additional reality and an indescribable fascination, for it describes the travels and ghastly hardships of a friend.

In 1899, while traveling with Mr Barbour Eathrop, of Chicago, I met the author in the Port of Spain, and I shall never forget the enthusiasm with which Mr Eathrop announced the discovery of this unusual naturalist. We traveled with him later from La Guayra to Panama, and the last time I saw him he was running home a charge in his muzzle-loader after a shot at some gorgeous Colombian song bird.

To the public at large South America is a puzzle. It reads of the great industrial and railway development of the Argentine, of the immense waterway of the Amazon, of the beauties of Rio de Janeiro, and of the ancient Inca civilization of Peru, but there is a silence in the popular literature regarding the immense center of the continent, to which these civilizations of the Argentine, Chili, Peru, and Venezuela form the merest fringe. Eugène André has pushed his way along the watercourses and through the jungles of this greatest of all unexplored tropical regions of the world, and this book which he has written gives a picture of the extreme discomforts, the real hardships, and the frightful exposure to disease and starvation which attends the work of exploration in the uninhabited tropical forest. To a boy familiar with the popular literature on tropical forests nothing could be more delightful than to make one's way, with hunting outfit and canoes, from Rio to Panama, living on the game and the fruits of the forest. André's account of