Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material, and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them. It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the volume before us. That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly, contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the representatives of the two European nations,--the one of which has wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living development, of North America.