peaks, has had in it a large clement of science and the search for knowledge but also an equally large clement of sheer adventure and sport, for it has required physically well-trained men, willing to adopt special modes of living and special dicts, and also men of imagination who could work long and arduously for the sake of a record. It is no dispraise of the scientific re- sults of explorers to say that the appeal of exploration in many cases has been to the romantic and adventurous rather than the strictly scientific, though the name of science is always in- voked to strengthen each new enterprise. Peary put the case more frankly. He thought the attainment of the North Pole by an American a matter of patriotic pride and that the way to get there was to live like the Eskimo, have exceptional powers of endurance, and expend unlimited muscular energy.
It is altogether a modern thing to look at the great objects of exploration from the purely scientific standpoint. David and Mawson in the Antarctic and Stefansson in his Arctic work of the past decade have done this. It was characteristic of Colo- nel Roosevelt that he should never be carried away by his nar- rative, or the adventure which he was living, to such an extent as to overlook the scientific value of the thing he was observ- ing. Everything that he wrote bears the stamp of the pioneer spirit. He was curious about the pionecr. He wanted to see how he lived, how he met the special conditions of his environ- ment, whether of frost or heat or flood or drought; and, above all, he was keen about the motives that lay back of that restless energy which the pioneer has always displayed and that independence of spirit that has made him so great a factor in history. Both his African and South American journeys have yielded notable pioneer studies, and his observations on west- ern life and especially his historical studies in the ‘‘Winning of the West” are contributions of a high order. Livingstone was for a long time almost alone in having an unquenchable inter- est in the frontier of modern life in Africa and the effect of the oncoming wave of civilization upon the native peoples whom he knew and loved. That is why his writings will have a classic interest long after the romantic and adventurous work of others shall have passed into comparative forgetfulness.
