The Historian no longer writes History by warming over the pancakes of his predecessors. He must surely know what they have done, and how—and whereby they succeeded and wherein they failed. But his own labor is to find the sidelights they did not have. Macaulay saves him from doing again all the research that Macaulay had to do; but if he could find a twin Boswell or a second Pepys he would rather have either than a dozen new Macaulays. Since history is becoming really a Science, and is no more a closet exploration of half-digested arm-chair books, we are beginning to learn the overwhelming value of the contemporary witness. Even a justice's court will not admit Hearsay Evidence; and Science has been shamed into adopting the same sane rule. Nowadays it demands the eye-witness. We look less for the "Authorities" now, and more for the Documents. There are too many histories already, such as they are—self-satisfied and oracular, but not one conclusive. Every history is put out of date, almost daily, by the discovery of some scrap of paper or some clay tablet from under the ashes of Babylon.

Mere Humans no longer read History—except in school where they have to, or in study clubs where it is also Required. But a plain personal narrative is interesting now as it has been for five thousand years. The world's greatest book is of course compulsory; but what is the interesting part of it? Why, the stories—Adam and Eve; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Saul and David and Samson and Delilah; Solomon, Job, and Jesus the Christ! And if anyone thinks Moses worked-in a little too much of the Family Tree—he doesn't know what biblical archÆology is doing. For it is thanks to these same "petty" details that modern Science, in its excavations and decipherings, has verified the Bible and resolved many of its riddles!

Greece had one Herodotus. America had four, antedating the year 1600. All these truly great historians built from all the "sources" they could find. But none of them quite give us the homely, vital picture of life and feeling that one untaught and untamed soldier, Bernal Diaz, wrote for us three hundred years ago when he was past ninety, and toothless—and angry "because the historians didn't get it straight." The student of Spanish America has often to wish there had been a Bernal Diaz for every decade and every province from 1492 to 1800. His unstudied gossip about the conquest of Mexico is less balanced and less authoritative, but far more illuminative, than the classics of his leader, Cortez—a university man, as well as a great conqueror.

For more than a quarter of a century it was one of my duties to study and review (for the Nation and other critical journals) all sorts of local chronicles all over Spanish and English America—particularly of frontier times. In this work I have read searchingly many hundreds of volumes; and have been brought into close contact with our greatest students and editors of "History-Material," and with their standards.

I have read no other such book with so unflagging interest and content as these memoirs of Harris Newmark. My personal acquaintance with Southern California for more than thirty years may color my interest in names and incidents; but I am appraising this book (whose proofs I have been permitted to read thoroughly) from the standpoint of the student of history anywhere. Parkman and Fiske and Coues and Hodge and Thwaites would join me in the wish that every American community might have so competent a memorandum of its life and customs and growth, for its most formative half-century.

This is not a history. It is two other much more necessary things—for there is no such thing as a real History of Los Angeles, and cannot be for years. These are the frank, naÏve, conversational memoirs of a man who for more than sixty years could say of Southern California almost as truly as Æneas of his own time—"All of which I saw, much of which I was." The keen observation, the dry humor, the fireside intimacy of the talk, the equity and accuracy of memory and judgment—all these make it a book which will be much more valued by future generations of readers and students. We are rather too near to it now.

But it is more than the "confessions" of one ripe and noble experience. It is, beyond any reasonable comparison, the most characteristic and accurate composite picture we have ever had of an old, brave, human, free, and distinctive life that has changed incredibly to the veneers of modern society. It is the very mirror of who and what the people were that laid the real foundations for a community which is now the wonder of the historian. The very details which are "not Big enough" for the casual reader (mentally over-tuned to newspaper headlines and moving pictures) are the vital and enduring merits of this unpretentious volume. No one else has ever set down so many of the very things that the final historian of Los Angeles will search for, a hundred years after all our oratories and "literary efforts" have been well forgotten. It is a chronicle indispensable for every public library, every reference library, the shelf of every individual concerned with the story of California.

It is the Pepys's Diary of Los Angeles and its tributary domain.

Charles F. Lummis.