Evening star., 1925-10-17
THE LIBRARY TABLE
BY the BookLOper.

the pre- Christian Scandinavians hell
was inoased in snow and eternal ice.
To the Norseman blue with cold, a hot
hell sounded too pleasant to be hell
at all. According to story centuries
old. a missionary to the heathen north
men preached a hell-f1re sermon. Now
of course said one of the cold ones,
we all want to go to that nice warm
place you speak Of But tell us. do we
have to be mean and kill folks and
make a lot of trouble before we can
go?'"
No, the foregoing paragraph is not
quoted from a treatise on theology,
but is the opening paragraph of
book on economic geography-a sub
ject which too often calls out deadly
dull books. In the case Of Prof. j.
Russell Smiths North America" this
good start is characteristic of the
style and interest of the entire book.
The relevance of the temperature Of
the lower regions TO a study of our
continent is promptly disclosed. Hell
has been pictured as a hot place be
cause the Old Testament Hebrew lived
on the edge of the desert, and to be
lost in the desert and to suffer from
heat and thirst was to him the most
terrible thing imaginable. Marf's con
ceptions are shaped by the place, the
environment with which he is famil-
iar-the earth or the part of the earth
in which he lives. This generalization
leads up to the question: How does
the continent of North America in
fiuence man as he makes his living
and lives his life upon it?" Prof.
Smiths book is the astonishingly fun
and graphic answer to this question.
Prof. Smith has not simply drawn
on the stores of printed material, but
has supplemented his studies by eX-
tensive travel and personal inquiry.
The result is a fat volume, we'll writ
ten, profusely illustrated, well ar
ranged and packed full of attested in
formation on the economic geography
not only of the United States, but of
Canada, Newfoundland, the West In
dies, Mexico and Central America. In
discussing what it is that makes
America At to be the home of great
people he discounts the conventional
explanation that the United States
gained her position in the world be-
cause she had the good luck to be oc-
cupied by "a people of amazing in
herent qualities" who had the wisdom
to adopt a republican form of govern
y
history is to be explained in large
part, and that her future may also be
predicted in large part, in terms of
the three great fundamentals
sources, climate and location and ac-
cess. In working out this thesis he
takes the reader on tour of the yari-
Gus sections of the continent and gives
him an exhaustive account Of the re-
sources and economic development of
of Faia
historical and political exposition to
complete the picture. In the course
of the journey the reader finds ac-
counts of things big and little, old and
new-such things as clipper ships, the
Yankee peddler, aba andoned farms of
New England, the boil weevil, coop
erative cheese making, the tourist in
dustry of Florida, the use of poison
gas to eXterminate prairie dogs and
the motion picture industry of Holly
wood. The author tells us why green
corn grown in Maine is better suited
for canning than that of Illinois, why
half of the working people of Troy
make collars and cuffs, why the larg-
est scale factory is at st. Johnsbury
and why there are fewer people in the
neighborhood of jamestown than there
were in 1920.
The last volume of the four-part
novel, THE Peasants" by the Polish
winner of the Nobel prize, Ladislas
Reymont, has recently appeared under
the title Summer" The same peasant
characters appear as in the three
previous volumes, with the addition
of others. The old peasant Boryna,
one of the most prosperous OF his COM
munity, who IN Spring" had become
bedridden and was at the mercy of
his unfaithful second wife and his
propertyhungry grown children, dies
at the beginning of Summer" The
ceremonies and lamentations attending
his funeral give good idea of Polish
peasant customs. Vagina, the widow
of Boryna, becomes the chief charac-
ter in this volume and the hatred and
spite Of the community toward her
make her life a tragedy. The mar
rowly circumscribed life of the peas
ants, wherein the struggle for exist
ence is SO sharp that kindness and
generosity can rarely be afforded is
made as vivid in this as In the former
volumes. The four together make
great epic of the soil.
x x
A jungle thriller. and all true. is
William Beebe's Jungle Days. The
country described is the same stretch
of jungle in Guiana as in Jungle
Nights" and Jungle Peace" The
mystery of the animal and plant life
of the jungle impresses Mr.. Beebe, as
1t does every one who lives for a time
in the midst of it. AT times every foot
of the forest seems alive with the
movement of animals small and large
and the whispering of vegetation. The
rule of the jungle is not Live and let
live" but "Devour or be devoured,' .
and so from the lion to the ant all life
makes war on other life. Snakes,
spiders, lizards, crabs, bugs and beetles
of all sorts, as well as myriads of mon
keys, and some of the larger animals,
swarm through Mr.. Beebe's pages as
they do in the jungle itself. There is
a chapter about his Jungle work table,
on which he studies under the micro
scope the forms of life about which he
writes. Another chapter is on the
falling leaves. another on the thousand
year life cycle Of the mangrove tree,
and another called THE Life of
Death" which tells about the wonder
full adaptations of plant and animal
life to environment and their way of
living on the dead. The chapter "Old
Time People," develops a theory of
human ancestry which would not
please the fundamentalists.
X X X X
In THE Matriarch" G.. B. Stern
wrote big family novel; in "Thun-
derstorm" she has taken a smaller
and lighter theme. Johnny Morgan,
writer; Theo, his wife; Elizabeth,
his cousin, and Capt. Locke, a pen
stoned naval officer, are all in Italy
together, at La Collina, above the
town of Santa Nucia, on the Mediter-
ranean. The story turns on an in
trigue of Elizabeth and Capt Locke
to keep the Morgans in Italy when
it is decidedly to their advantage