REVIEWS.
This is an informal narrative of personal experience and of family and neighborhood history. The reader is taken at once into this circle and is treated as if he were rightfully of it. Indeed, the design of the author seems at first to have been to write a book which should be read only by members of the family circle. The original design has determined the familiar style of the narrative, and doubtless in a measure the selection of many of the incidents. The book does not profess to be anything else than what it is. But it is here that its interest and its value lie. It is interesting, sometimes thrilling, to any one who has a feeling for the romance and the tragedy of the migrations of those early days across the plains and mountains and of the beginnings of society in the Oregon wilderness. Any one who loves the story of adventure will find it here. He will find, too, a record of patient 'endurance, high fortitude, and sometimes of real heroism, with a remarkable absence of much that mars most stories of adventure.
The book is valuable. It bears the mark of actual experience. We need to have such experiences told and written and put on the shelves of our home and public libraries, lest in the rapid advance of the Oregon Country in the comforts and luxuries of modern life we forget what it cost to rear the foundations of this noble State. Let us have them all, and have them told, as here, as if to the grand children at the fireside.
J. B. Wilson.
The purpose of this work "is to tell the story of the discoveries" of Puget Sound and its environs "and to explain the meaning of the geographic names in use." It is distinctively a work in historical geography in which the journal of the explorer is reproduced (occupying pages 61-334, with biographical foot-notes and photographs interspersed), and emphasis is placed on the portraits and biographies of men honored in the naming of geographic features. The author's, or probably we had better say, editor's, great achievement is found in the success with which he prosecuted his search for portraits and biographical details. Professor Meany's previous activity in erecting
