tates, grew in
twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia, Texas,
Mexico, and Central America, aside from five volumes on the Native Races
and six volumes of essays. Meantime he was printing these volumes
in sets of thousands and selling them through an army of agents that
covered America.

Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the Southern Pacific
Railroad into a network, interlocked with other systems and steamship
lines, not only enveloping California land but also the whole economic
and political life of that and other states, with headquarters in the
U.S. Congress. Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927),
taking over his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino,
California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to make, without
benefit of any institution of learning and in defiance of all the slow
processes of tradition found at Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington
Library and a Huntington Art Gallery that, set down amid the most costly
botanical profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.

The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as "terribly" as
mighty Raleigh. The "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth seemed, indeed,
to be translated to another sphere, though here the elements that went
into the mixture were less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale
were applied to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men
stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the
wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal
and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. The
Huntingtons paid a quarter of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The
Blue Boy." It is very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits
for some artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and
thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it hangs over elm
or oak.

Most of the books in this section could be placed in other sections.
Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality, energy, and daring
characteristic of our frontiers. To quote Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the
adventures of mettle have always had "a tension that would not let them
rest."

BARKER, EUGENE C. _The Life of Stephen F. Austin_, Dallas, 1925.
Republished by Texas State Historical Association, Austin. Iron-wrought
biography of the leader in making Texas Anglo-American.

BELL, HORACE. _Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Ear