SCENERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

By William Oakes. With 16 platesfrom, drawings by Isaac Sprague. With aforeword and commentary by ShermanAdams '20. Somersworth: New Hampshire Publishing Company. $25.

In Dartmouth days of a half century ago Sherman Adams climbing in the White Mountains gazed down on forests, streams, and ponds and even then worried about their protection and preservation. He is a maw to speak from the heart and mind about how the White Mountains looked 150 years ago before the ravages of intrusion and decay.

This is a book for Dartmouth men dwarfed and squeezed in the canyons of New York who long for Mount Washington elevation and expansion; for Dartmouth men choking; in Los Angeles smog who on Mount Crawford' would breathe deeply of New Hampshire air; for Dartmouth men sweltering in a; Middle-Western summer drought who; dream of Echo Lake abounding not with sluggish catfish but with brisk swimmers and brisker pickerel; for Dartmouth men who,- sicken of soft-face permissiveness in old and young and who yearn for the Old Man of the Mountain, his countenance fixed and: stern; who "neither blinks at the near flashes of: the lightning beneath his nose nor flinches, from the driving snow and sleet of the Franconia winter, which makes the very mercury of the thermometer shrink into the bulb and congeal"; and for Dartmouth men historically minded who like to know who did; what in the White Mountains.

Is the book worth $25? It is a better value than the original Scenery of the WhiteMountains, published in 1848, out of print, a collector's item, now selling for more than $1:00 at auctions. This large new volume, hardbound, hand-sewn, and slipcased, designed' by: David May, is a pleasure for eye and; living-room table. It contains all of William; Oakes' 1848 commentaries, with Adams' additions, all of the original 16 plates, many full page. Of these 13 were illustrations drawn by Isaac Sprague, the artist's assistant to Audubon, the ornithologist.

A Harvard man, William Oakes, born 1759, who died 1849 not by falling off a mountain but off an East Boston ferry, gave up his law practice after two years to study botany and achieved a national reputation for this collection of New England flora.

Sherman Adams is a nature lover with global criteria. The Alps may boast of immense and forbidding ridges and peaks covered with perpetual snow, but the autumnal glories of the White Mountains are wholly unknown in Europe, which lacks the brilliantly kaleidoscopic reds and yellows of maple and beech contrasted and heightened by green and black masses of spruce and fir with rocky and bare summits as backdrops.

William Oakes, Isaac Sprague, and Sherman Adams may be trusted to give you a lift. Looking down on ridges and peaks near and distant, your eye will command the whole circumference from the Green Mountains to the Atlantic, almost too much of a visual stimulus in this era of limited horizons.