Education is a marvellously fine thing, and in mountaineering it works wonders. It enables men to interpret the barren truth in accordance with their own experience. Notes of new ascents in the ‘Alpine Journal’ they can enjoy and assimilate; but, as in eating caviare, the taste needs cultivation, and many remain unequal to such food to the ends of their lives. Now because there are many false translations possible of the one true original, it must be easy with a knowledge of the truth to interpret it variously, and correspondingly difficult to get at the correct version from a bad translation. Even the mountaineering education fails to help us. All it does is to give us the taste for truth, and the sense of right to demand the genuine article. It might be printed in italics at the beginning of the chapter, like the usually inappropriate and obscure poetical references, and so isolated from the author’s personal exposition. This text and sermon notion has not, so far as my little library of Alpine books can tell me, been adopted by any popular writer on mountaineering, though the difficulty has been grappled with in other ways. Thus the Alpine historian or geographer may find the required facts neatly gathered together in a brief appendix, or still more briefly summarised in a letter published simultaneously with a review of the book in the ‘Alpine Journal.’ The sale of caviare is strictly limited, and the demand for ‘Alpine Notes and New Ascents’ confined to the few. Hence mountaineering books intended to sell well are written for the uneducated many, not for teaching purposes, but for the satisfaction of their desire for tales of adventure. So long as climbers tolerate this professionalism introduced into mountaineering--and there is every reason why they should in all cases where the professional is recognized as such--they must necessarily give the artist a free hand, whether he writes or paints or takes photographs. Personally I should ask for information as to the treatment of any negative that has been employed for reproduction of pictures. ‘From a photograph by,’ nowadays suggests a bad camera, a shaky tripod, an amateur operator, a cunning artist, and a long purse. But ‘truth is mighty and will prevail,’ so we may as well get on to the Arrowhead.