This supplementary French-language reader provides teachers and students with authentic historical documents describing the French exploration and settlement of the lower Mississippi Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More than a hundred selections of varying lengths and in a range of difficulty from intermediate to advanced provide lively subject matter, including French and Indian diplomacy and wars, the earliest appearance of Africans in the Mississippi Valley, and some of the first European observations of the natural history of the region. Each selection includes an English introduction, marginal vocabulary, and French study questions. The book is generously illustrated with contemporary engravings and woodcuts. Developed with the advice of classroom teachers from secondary schools and colleges, Rencontres sur le Mississipi, 1682-1763 offers the creative teacher an opportunity to anchor the language-learning experience in historical texts to the natural environment and geography already familiar to students.

The order of this book is in a general way from the easy to the more difficult, with an attempt, also, at an agreeable variety. The editor has purposely avoided breaking up the book into lesson portions or giving it the air of a text-book. There is no reason why children should not read books as older people read them, for pleasure, and dissociate them from a too persistent notion of tasks. It is entirely possible that some teachers may find it out of the question to lead their classes straight through this book, but there is nothing to forbid them from judicious skipping, or, what is perhaps more to the point, from helping pupils over a difficult word or phrase when it is encountered; the interest which the child takes will carry him over most hard places. It would be a capital use of the book also if teachers were to draw upon it for poems which their pupils should, in the suggestive phrase, learn by heart. To this purpose the contents are singularly well adapted; for, from the single line proverb to a poem by Wordsworth, there is such a wide range of choice that the teacher need not resort to the questionable device of giving children fragments and bits of verse and prose to commit to memory. One of the greatest services we can do the young mind is to accustom it to the perception of wholes, and whether this whole be a lyric or a narrative poem like Evangeline, it is almost equally important that the young reader should learn to hold it as such in his mind. To treat a poem as a mere quarry out of which a particularly smooth stone can be chipped is to misinterpret poetry. A poem is a statue, not a quarry.