ALASKA: Its Southern Coast. And the Sitkan Archipelago. By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.50. In this well-written and exceedingly interesting volume the author opens up to us a country which notwithstanding so much has been said of it, is yet very imperfectly known. Although it is nine times as large as New England, and twice as large as Texas, it is the popular impression that it is all a barren, inhospitable region, wrapped in snow and ice the greater part of the year, and that a visitor to its settlements must undergo perils almost equal to those of the Greely relief expedition. Miss Scidmore in her book dispels this illusion in the most summary manner. She spent two summers in Alaska, and therefore speaks from personal knowledge. She tells us that the winters at Sitka are milder than those in New York, while the summers are delightfully cool and temperate. Some of the grandest scenery of the continent is to be found along the Alaska coast, in the region of the Alexander or Sitkan Archipelago, and the monthly mail steamer is crowded with tourists during the summer season. It is one of the easiest and most delightful trips to go up the coast by the inside passage and cruise through the archipelago; and in voyaging past the unbroken wilderness of the island shores, the tourist feels quite like an explorer penetrating unknown lands. The mountain range that walls the Pacific coast from the Antarctic to the Arctic gives a bold and broken front to the mainland, and every one of the eleven hundred islands of the archipelago is but a submerged spur or peak of the great range. Many of the islands are larger than Massachusetts or New Jersey, but none of them have been wholly explored, nor is the survey of their shores completed. The Yosemite walls and cascades are repeated in mile after mile of deep salt water channels, and from the deck of an ocean steamer one views scenes not paralleled after long rides and climbs in the heart of the Sierras. The gorges and canons of Colorado are surpassed; mountains that tower above Pike's Peak rise in steep incline from the still level of the sea; and the shores are clad in forests and undergrowth dense and impassable as the tangle of a Florida swamp.