Abstract
A VERY pleasant admixture of science and personal adventure, from the hand of one who is evidently a sincere lover of nature, and is gifted with considerable descriptive power. Men and manners in the Far West are depicted with much humour; and one chapter, entitled Kaweah's Run, narrating the escape of the author from a couple of brigands who attempted to hunt him down, will show that a Government surveyor's work in America is apt to be more exciting than pleasant. It is a good while since we have read a book so thoroughly unaffected and fresh; redolent of the clear air of those lofty Sierras where (hear it, ye Alpine climbers, who, in your haunts, daily curse Jupiter Pluvius !) fine weather is the rule. The description of some of Mr. King's scrambles is enough to make the Alpine Club rush off in a body to Mount Whitney; but we cannot help suspecting that his neck would have more than once been safer had he known the rules of that fraternity and carried a good piolet.
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.
By Clarence King. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1872.)
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BONNEY, T. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada . Nature 6, 78 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006078a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006078a0