The early mountaineers entered into a literary field that was almost unexplored. They could write of their hill journeys with the assurance of men branching out into unknown byways. They could linger on the commonplaces of hill travel, and praise the freedom of the hills with the air of men enunciating a paradox. To glorify rough fare, simple quarters, a bed of hay, a drink quaffed from the mountain stream, must have afforded Gesner the same intellectual pleasure that Mr. Chesterton derives from the praise of Battersea and Beer. And this joy in emotions which had yet to be considered trite lingers on even into the more sedate pages of _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_. The contributors to those classic volumes were rather frightened of letting themselves go; but here and there one lights on some spontaneous expression of delight in the things that are the very flesh and blood of our Alpine experience--the bivouac beneath the stars, the silent approach of dawn, the freemasonry of the rope, the triumph of the virgin summit. “Times have changed since then,” wrote Donald Robertson in a recent issue of _The Alpine Journal_-- “Times have changed since then, and with them Alpine literature. Mountaineering has become a science, and, as in other sciences, the professor has grown impatient of the average intelligence, and evolved his own tongue. To write for the outside public is to incur the odium of ‘popular science,’ a form of literature fascinating to me, but anathema to all right-minded men. Those best qualified to speak will only address themselves to those qualified to listen, and therefore only in the jargon of their craft. But the hall-mark of technical writing is the assumption of common knowledge. What all readers know for themselves, it is needless and even impertinent to state. Hence, in the climbing stories written for the elect, the features common to all climbs must either be dismissed with a brief reference, or lightly treated as things only interesting in so far as they find novel expression.” Those who worship Clio the muse will try to preserve the marriage of history and literature, but those whose only claim to scholarship is their power to collate facts by diligent research, those who have not the necessary ability to weave these facts into a vital pattern, will always protest their devotion to what is humorously dubbed scientific history. So in the Alpine world, which has its own academic traditions and its own mandarins, you will find that those who cannot translate emotions (which it is to be hoped they share) into language which anybody could understand are rather apt to explain their discreet silence, by the possession of a delicate reserve that forbids them to emulate the fine writing of a Ruskin or the purple patches of Meredith.