The Labrador Coast. a Journal of Two Summer Cruises in that Region With Notes on its Early Discovery, on the Eskimo, on its Physical Geography, Geology, and Natural History

Abstract

A LARGE part of this excellent work has already appeared in various journals published in the United States. These contributions are not known, we fear, so widely as they deserve to be—in this country at least—and therefore Dr. Packard has been well advised to gather the scattered fragments into a homogeneous whole, making, in the truest and widest sense, a geographical study of the greatest value and interest. Chapters vii. to xvii., with the exception of Chapter xiii., are entirely new, and contain the latest results of studies which the author has made peculiarly his own, with the result that his claim that the contents of this volume represent the state of our present knowledge of the coast and interior is perfectly well founded. The outstanding feature of the work is its wide scope, appealing as it does to the geographer, the geologist, the naturalist (to use the word in its more limited sense), the botanist, the ethnologist, and the historian. Each of these will find the subject in which he is interested treated with considerable skill, and, so far as opportunity for original research allowed, with minuteness and perspicuity. One fault we have to find with the style, and that is an occasional looseness in the use of nomenclature. This distracts the reader's attention, and, until he has gone back and re-read many passages, leads him to question several statements which, when their meaning is fully grasped, are seen to be correct but badly expressed. Should a second edition of the work be called for, revision in this respect would result in a very marked improvement.

The Labrador Coast: a Journal of Two Summer Cruises in that Region. With Notes on its Early Discovery, on the Eskimo, on its Physical Geography, Geology, and Natural History.

By Adolphus Spring Packard With Maps and Illustrations. New York: N. D. C. Hodges. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1891.)