used always to fix an electric pocket lamp
or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after
turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he
has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.

The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and
mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well.
Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political
science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was
there _in extenso_. The books on civics and economics and theories of
finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly
penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening
visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner,
was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly
editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a
very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held
long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and
glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere
biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of
the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science
and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my role was chiefly that
of fascinated listener.

Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims
to authorship himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something
of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and
details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a
book which, under the title of _Principles of Mining_, has been a
well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance
in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the
author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it
contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge
originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a
compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a
model of modest appraisement of his work. One of its paragraphs simply
demands quotation:

"The bulk of the material presented [in this book] is the common
heritage of the profession, and if any may think there is
insufficient reference to previous writers, let him endeavor to