and
small.

At the outset I have been confronted with a difficulty because of this
double objective. The role of the interpreter is not always welcome. If
I write what is vaguely known as a "popular" book, wise men have warned
me that any scientific intrusion, however lightly and dramatically
rendered, will displease its natural audience. If I write the simplest
of scientific books, I am warned that a large body of warm-blooded,
wholesome, enthusiastic Americans, the very ones above all others whose
keen enjoyment I want to double by doubling their sources of pleasure,
will have none of it. The suggestion that I make my text "popular" and
carry my "science" in an appendix I promptly rejected, for if I cannot
give the scientific aspects of nature their readable values in the text,
I cannot make them worth an appendix.

Now I fail to share with my advisers their poor opinion of the taste,
enterprise, and intelligence of the wide-awake American, but, for the
sake of my message, I yield in some part to their warnings. Therefore I
have so presented my material that the miscalled, and, I verily believe,
badly slandered "average reader," may have his "popular" book by
omitting the note on the Appreciation of Scenery, and the several notes
explanatory of scenery which are interpolated between groups of
chapters. If it is true, as I have been told, that the "average reader"
would omit these anyway, because it is his habit to omit prefaces and
notes of every kind, then nothing has been lost.

The keen inquiring reader, however, the reader who wants to know values
and to get, in the eloquent phrase of the day, all that's coming to him,
will have the whole story by beginning the book with the note on the
Appreciation of Scenery, and reading it consecutively, interpolated
notes and all. As this will involve less than a score of additional
pages, I hope to get the message of the national parks in terms of their
fullest enjoyment before much the greater part of the book's readers.

The pleasure of writing this book has many times repaid its cost in
labor, and any helpfulness it may have in advancing the popularity of
our national parks, in building up the system's worth as a national
economic asset, and in increasing the people's pleasure in all scenery
by helping them to appreciate their greatest scenery, will come to me as
pure profit. It is my earnest hope that this profit may be large.

A similar spirit has actuated the very