The North British Review (Volume 41-42) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. VII.?Frost and Fire,. Natural Engines, Foot-marks, and Chips, with Sketehes taken at Home and Abroad. By a Traveller. " The aim of this book is to show that where light shines, there also force radiates. . . . That is the sum of the whole; but to reach that point is a long stage in an endless journey." To reach the end of this stage, our traveller has made many a journey, sometimes long, but never a weary one; and the result, as recorded in Frost and Fire, is a book which many will delight in reading. The method employed by the author . is in every sense eminently healthy. He has not been content, while reading books bearing on his subject, merely to glance here, and to cast an eye there, after the fashion of some who play at geology or other branches of science, and, deluding themselves with the idea that they are doing practical work, rush into print with scraps of ill-digested knowledge. True, he calls his book a " rough work, done with sorry tools," but this saying thoughtful readers will readily dissent from, for the main tools that wrought the work were a vigorous mind working in a vigorous body, which for twenty years or thereabout has wandered over the world alive to all sorts of impressions derived directly from nature about the subjects he best loves. So clear-sighted, indeed, are his descriptions, that it is not too much to say that great part of the book belongs to that class of works of which Darwin's Jmmial of a Naturalist is the highest type. Pleasant records of journeys and personal adventure are scattered through two beautiful volumes, as if to prove to his readers that the author has a right to say what he says in the more scientific parts of the book,?a right founded on long experience, which we soon discover has been well employed, even when we dissent ...