Their Weight in Wildcats：是一本故事书的名字，具体暗示什么不得而知。whip 是defeat（打败；战胜）之意。

Their Weight in Wildcats : Tales of the Frontier. Edited by James Daugherty. (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936. xiii + 188 pp. Illustrations. $3.00.)

The last literary man to discover the grandeur and the ignominy of the American frontier and backwoods scenes is the native son. With the exception of the cobwebbed criticisms of Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Trol-

lope, and Charles Dickens, most of the foreign writers on America marvel at the country's unexploited possibilities. It is incredible that American writers should continue to write rhapsodies on what the Turks spared atop the Acropolis and disregard what the Spaniards attempted to de-stroy in New Mexico and Arizona. It would seem that enough men have tried their hands at rattling the bones of a mythical, fifteen hundred years old British king, and that it is time they wrote a few verses about the gigantic ghosts in their own attic. Some few have done this ; the pity is that too often they have not been able to see how tall the spirits stand across the rafters.

In Their Weight in Wildcats, James Daugherty is of the mind of old Sam Houston who said that American writers should forget "European castles and their crazy knights and lady loves, and set themselves to work to glean the unwritten legends of heroism and adventure which the old men would tell them who are now smoking their pipes around the roof-trees of Kentucky and Tennessee." And a fine array of howlers down-the-wilderness he has brought to a rendezvous. Mainly from the old accounts, such as " The Hive of the Bee Hunter" and " The Great West," are the excerpts taken, and each is complete with a satisfactory page essay and illustrations from Mr. Daugherty 's pen that would satisfy even the buckskin heroes themselves. In the collection are such bona fide frontiersmen as Colonel Boone, of the Kentucky traces ; Lewis Weitzel, the Indian killer ; Simon Kenton, the gauntlet runner ; and Kit Carson, the mountain man. There are such folk heroes as the simple Johnny Appleseed ; Paul Bunyan, the father of lumbering; John Henry, the Natchral Man ; and the Big Bear of the Arkansas. And there are such liars as Mike Fink, the keelboatman ; Jim Beckwourth, the war chief of the Crows; and Colonel Davy Crockett — who kills his bears and sells his coon hide for corn liquor on election day.

Students of both literary and historical Americana, as well as the general reader, are indebted to Mr. Daugherty for his one volume library of the brave wilderness days. It is to be hoped that someone will under-take presently the complete reissue of a number of the numerous fine old sagas now found in rare book rooms about the country.

Western Reserve University HAROLD A. BLAINE