SPEAK TO THE EARTH.

By William A.Breyfogle '28. New York: MacmillanCompany, 1961. 174 pp. $3.75.

Thanks to the inspiration of Leroy H. Dreher '27, the author's campus colleague in The Arts and lifetime friend, and the cooperation of the Macmillan Company, several of the best of Bill Breyfogle's unpublished essays on natural history and human ecology are preserved in this easy-to-read collection of his pungent comments on our way of life - past, present, and future.

Readers in the campus area and Bill's contemporaries in the Class of 1928 will recall the cruel irony by which Bill in 1958 suddenly lost his life - the sting of a bee in the insect kingdom he admired, studied, and interpreted in both meter and prose.

A reviewer is tempted to quote many of the provocative statements from this posthumous anthology which are underlined in his copy. Space permits only three:

"More eloquently than any other field of inquiry, natural history preaches the doctrine of One World - a common birthright and a common loyalty."

"Good soil is in a state of careful balance. When the balance is disturbed, trouble begins."

"Man has the dubious distinction of being both the most creative and the most destructive of all living things."

Born and raised in the lake country of Peterborough, Ontario; educated among the hills of Dartmouth, the dons of Oxford, and the halls of Munich; matured on the vantage ground of Norwich with his own rich library of natural history within easy reach; Bill Breyfogle was destined to follow the trail of Thoreau, Hudson, Bates, White, Wallace, and a score of other naturalistwriters he admired. A single bee on a quiet summer afternoon on his own grounds ended what should have been - at the untimely age of fifty-two.

But Bill's basic philosophy toward life - of all kinds - is now perpetuated in this orderly arrangement of his best essays - splendidly illustrated by William J. Schaldach.