CURRENT LITERATURE.
ACROSS ICELAND.
Across Iceland. By William Bisiker. (Edward Arnold. 12s. 6d.) —This is a pleasant, unpretentious, and valuable volume of notes describing a journey made during the summer of 1900 across Central Iceland from the-north-east to the south-west by "a semi- scientific party" of six, including men and women interested chiefly in botany and geology. The author describes his part in the expedition as that of the geographer, "whose mission it was to make a map of a small part of the country traversed, to get a general idea of its conformation, and to note valleys and mountains, ice-fields and snow-slopes, lava flows and hot springs, mighty rivers and tiny rivulets." The book is pleasant, perhaps, because it is not too painfully scientific reading, the author writing about all that he has seen and photographed in the simplest of fashions. There is, of course, a danger of his becoming flippant in his desire not to be stilted, and to this he occasionally yields, as when he tells the story of the Berserkers' lava-field. But on the whole the story is as informing and serious as it is agreeable. In the earlier part of the book, which treats of the voyage to Iceland and the main points of the coast, the Faroe Islands, Ice., some- what familiar ground is of course traversed. But the actual interior of the island, more particularly the north-west penin- sula, has probably never before been so minutely described. With the help of photographs it is indeed admirably reproduced. The style in which the work is written is as simple and business- like as it well could be. Thus of Reykjavik, the capital of the island, it is written :—" The natives are fishermen and farmers, and have no very strong predilections for general business—they are inclined to leave that sort of thing to the Danes, who are more adapted to it. The clergymen and doctors are, as a rule, the sons of farmers, who exhibit signs of greater brightness than the average. They first go through a course at the Latin school and then proceed to the Theological College or the Medical School; some afterwards go to Copenhagen to the University there."
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