While Eggleston grew to manhood on a frontier which had been a great battle-ground, the mere adventurous aspects of this life did not attract him when he sought subjects for his pen; but the culture-history of the people among whom his life fell interested him greatly, and he viewed events habitually with a critical eye. He found, however, that the evolution of society could not be treated satisfactorily in fiction, so he began, in 1880, while abroad, the researches in history which were to occupy him thereafter to the end of his life. His training as a student of social forces had been superior to any that he could have obtained in the colleges accessible to him, for he had seen life in the raw; he had known, on the one hand, the vanishing frontiersmen who founded commonwealths around the hunters’ camp-fires; and he had, on the other, witnessed the dawn of a new era which brought order and enlightenment. He thus became a delver in libraries only after he had scratched under the crust of life itself. While he turned first to the old seaboard colonies in pursuit of his new purpose, he brought to his research an actual knowledge of the beginnings of new States which he had gained in the open. He planned a history of life in the United States on new lines, his main idea being to trace conditions and movements to remotest sources. He collected and studied his material for sixteen years before he published any result of his labors beyond a few magazine papers. “The Beginnings of a Nation” (1896) and “The Transit of Civilization” (1901) are only part of the scheme as originally outlined, but they are complete as far as they go, and are of permanent interest and value. History was not to him a dusty lumber room, but a sunny street where people came and went in their habits as they lived; and thus, in a sense, he applied to history the realism of fiction. He pursued his task with scientific ardor and accuracy, but without fussiness or dullness. His occupations as novelist and editor had been a preparation for his later work, for it was the story quality that he sought in history, and he wrote with an editorial eye to what is salient and interesting. It is doubtful whether equal care has ever been given to the preparation of any other historical work in this country. The plan of the books is in itself admirable, and the exhaustive character of his researches is emphasized by copious notes, which are hardly less attractive than the text they amplify and strengthen. He expressed himself with simple adequacy, without flourish, and with a nice economy of words; but he could, when he chose, throw grace and charm into his writing. He was, in the best sense, a humanist. He knew the use of books, but he vitalized them from a broad knowledge of life. He had been a minister, preaching a simple gospel, for he was never a theologian as the term is understood, but he enlisted zealously in movements for the bettering of mankind, and his