THE NATURE WRITERS, A GUIDE TO RICHER READING

The results of a recent symposium were summarized by Professor Charles J. Lyon and printed in the October number of PLANT PHYSIOLOGY under the title Teaching Methods in Plant Physiology.

by HerbertFaulkner West '22. Stephen Daye Press,Brattleboro, Vermont, pp. 755.$2.00.

Professor West is not only a book lover and an indefatigable reader, but he possesses sesses the rare gift of being both anxious and able to communicate his enthusiasm to others, an ability recognized by the many undergraduates who elect his courses in Comparative Literature and the alumni readers of his Hanover Browsing column in this MAGAZINE. In The Nature Writers,A Guide to Richer Reading he presents his selection of some two hundred and fifty books, with brief notes as to author and contents of each. There is an introduction also in which Professor West submits a genealogy for the modern interest in nature, tracing it back to the Copernican revolution which "swept man out of his proud position as the central figure and end of the universe," and carrying the movement down through the Renaissance with its emphasis on naturalism, to which Spinoza was later to contribute pantheism, until finally in the eighteenth century came Rousseau and the Romantic movement with the great outburst of nature writing which has continued and increased to our time.

No reading list can avoid being subjective and this the author quite candidly admits. His selections reveal Professor West's fondness for the literature of the English countryside, the Arabian desert, mountain climbing, Arctic and Antarctic exploration as well as his interest in particular writers such as Rowland E. Robinson and Richard Jeffries. Nature becomes synonymous with the great outdoors, which is, perhaps, in good Dartmouth tradition; but the classic naturalists are here too, Darwin, Fabre, Thoreau, Burroughs and the rest. The book is best summarized by the author himself when he writes in his introduction: "Of the several thousand titles which may have been included I have selected some two hundred and fifty of my own favorites, and I immodestly declare that these are among the best nature books ever written. That is to say I believe I have missed few genuine nature classics."

The reader, I think, like this reviewer will find himself in substantial agreement with this contention.