Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly and off we go.

Tonight we're taking a stroll with one of the first American environmentalists, a Golf, edited by William Frederick Bade.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York,

1916.

Let's begin.

Introduction.

John Muir, Earth Planet, Universe.

These words are written on the inside cover of the notebook

from which the contents of this volume have been taken.

They reflect the mood in which the late author and explorer

undertook his thousand mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico a half century ago.

No less does this refreshingly cosmopolitan address, which might have startled any finder of the book, reveal

the temper and the comprehensiveness of Mr. Muir's mind. He never was and never could be a parochial student of nature.

Even at the early age of 29, his eager interest in every aspect of the natural world had made

him a citizen of the universe. While this was by far the longest botanical excursion which Mr Muir

made in his earlier years, it was by no means the only one.

He had botanized around the Great Lakes, in Ontario,

and through parts of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois. On these expeditions, he had disciplined himself

to endure hardship, for his notebooks disclosed the fact that he often went hungry and slept in the woods

...