servation from which Dr.
Jordan begins his charming delineations of seal-life, and there he
concludes the story; which, in the meantime, transforms itself into the
pathos of sad separations and finally into the dumb tragedy of slaughter
and death.

The author gives character--human character--to his personages,
discriminating them according to their natures into beings whose very
names, notwithstanding the limited range of their faculties, bring us
into intimate and profound sympathy with them. Old Atagh, the lordly
sea-bull of the Tolstoi Mys, looms up grandly above the rest--

In shape and gesture proudly eminent.

Matka, the wife, is an embodiment of her sex. Kotik is the child of her
choice. All her offspring are veritable children: the uncles are uncles,
the aunts are aunts, the cousins are cousins, and the rest are the rest.
Even the "supers" appear in the nebulous names of the drama.

The point of the "Tale of the Mist-Islands," the great lesson of it, is
the horrid abuses and cruelties to which the seals have been subjected
by the brutal fur-pirates who have thronged the Alaskan waters in the
past two decades, and whose intolerable lust of slaughter and
devastation has threatened the extinction of the fur-seal race. If the
story of "Matka and Kotik" could be perused, as it should be, by the
American people, the very mothers of the country would rise up against
the piratical butchers of the Pribilofs, who would quail under their
frown. Meanwhile, diplomacy drags its length, and official reports carry
to Congressional Committees a vague statistical account of what has been
done and is still doing in the Alaskan waters.

I most heartily commend to all who are interested--and who is not?--in
the fur-seal question and in the manner of its solution, Dr. Jordan's
interesting little book. I have hardly ever seen a better piece of
English than this. The author's style is admirable. I scarcely recall
another book so monosyllabic and terse. Whoever commences to read "Matka
and Kotik" will continue to the end. The story fascinates while it
instructs. I dare say that Dr. Jordan, in the scientific sketches which
are cunningly scattered in these paragraphs, is always correct.

If our space permitted, we should be glad to make extended quotations in
illustration of the sterling merits of this tale of our far Northwest. I
shall be obliged to conclude the review with only a single extract, but
must first remark that "Matk