Under the specific title of this volume,--the "Pioneers of France in the New World,"--the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated to three near kinsmen of the author,--young men who in the glory and beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism. Mr. Parkman mentions--allowing to it in his brief reference all the weight which it probably deserves--a vague tradition, which, had it been sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations. The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain, France, and England might have made an amicable division between them, would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner, Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story, slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and, so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.