THE JOURNALS OF LEWIS AND CLARK (504 pp.)Edited by Bernard DeVoto Houghton Mifflin ($6.50).
This was mighty strange stuff to be going to the President of the U.S. In one of the four boxes there was "a red fox Skin Containing a Magpie." In another "the bones & Skeleton of a Small burrowing wolf." A third contained a tin box of "insects mice &c."
These relics were not meant as a vulgar insult to President Jefferson. They were zoological samplings from Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,* of the U.S. Army, out to explore Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. Every U.S. schoolboy has heard of them,...