Valley in Indiana and the Red River Valley in North Dakota have each been subject of survey and study.”
The map here given shows the principal areas of swamp-lands in the United States.
Réclus (rā-klū), Jean Jacques Élisée. In 1830, a whole decade before Humboldt published Cosmos, his successor in the science of geography was born in a Protestant parsonage in the village of Ste. Foy-la-Grande, near Bordeaux, France. Having no money to gratify his taste for travel, Réclus was forced to find wonders at home. So he questioned his native bogs, moors and streams as to their world-old adventures and dug for the answers. He had two years at school in Berlin, which he spent in studying the natural sciences and in learning how to test physical phenomena. Returning home, he got into politics and into trouble and, fortunately for the world, was sent into exile by Napoleon III. Falling in with California goldseekers, he crossed our unexplored region of plains and mountains, and went back to publish a classical description of it that made him famous in science and literature and decided his life-work. He was past 40, and again in exile for meddling in politics, when he wrote La Terre (The Earth). This was followed by The Ocean. Monumental works in themselves, these volumes became merely introductory to his Géographie Universelle (21 volumes, 21,000 pages) that has been translated into every modern language. It was his life-work, occupying him from the age of 40 to 66. The work differs from most scientific treatises. To the profoundest knowledge and exactness Réclus brought the imagination of a poet, the literary style of a Ruskin. Many, indeed, most of the laws governing natural phenomena, were determined before Réclus, but he brought them all together and unified all. He summed them all up in this image of the earth on which we live. “A grain of dust in the fathomless abyss of creation, ever actuated by ceaseless motion, describing in ether a series of elliptical spirals, whirling with the velocity of a cannon-ball, shooting forward with the swiftness of light and rocking back and forth in its headlong flight—as if to salute the stars in passing.”
Absolutely scientific in its last analysis, only a poet could so transform dry facts. This great work, so plain, as easy to understand as a book of travels, as fascinating as a collection of romances, should be among the first to be purchased by any library, however small. Réclus died at Brussels on July 4, 1905. No biography of him has, as yet, appeared in translation.
Re′construc′tion in the South. The period known in the United States as Reconstruction followed hard after the Civil War, when it was necessary for the southern states to resume their place in the Union; and in seeking a solution of this problem the president and Congress soon were widely at variance. President Johnson adopted the theory that these states had never lost their position in the Union; and that, upon a renewal of their obligations to the Federal constitution and the laws of Congress, they were entitled to immediate restoration to their former relations as members of the Union. He accordingly proceeded to establish provisional governments in the seceded states, and by proclamation set forth the terms upon which these states would be recognized by him as members of the Union. One of these requirements was the ratification by each state of the thirteenth amendment to the Federal constitution, which had been adopted by Congress in February of 1865 and abolished slavery throughout the Union. The people of the seceded states proceeded to comply with the president's requirements. They held conventions, ratified the thirteenth amendment, framed new constitutions, and elected senators and representatives to Congress. But Congress, when it assembled in December, repudiated the restoration policy of the president. It was held by a large majority that the work of reconstruction properly belonged, not to the president, but to Congress; that the seceded states had lost their rights as members of the Union; and that they should be re-admitted only on such conditions as would secure and perpetuate the results of the war. Meanwhile the thirteenth amendment to the constitution had been ratified by the requisite number of states, and had been officially declared to be a part of the constitution of the United States. Congress now proceeded to confer citizenship upon the freedmen of the south. The Civil Rights Bill was passed over the veto of the president. The fourteenth amendment to the constitution, which included this and some other provisions, was also adopted and submitted to the states for ratification. It was ratified by Tennessee in 1866, and that state was re-admitted by Congress into the Union. The other southern states rejected the amendment. At length, in March, 1867, the reconstruction act of Congress was passed over the veto of the president. This act defined the conditions on which the southern states might be re-admitted, one of which was the ratification of the fourteenth amendment, and placed these states under military governors until these conditions should be complied with. In June and July of 1868 Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, having ratified the amendment and organized state governments under the provisions of the reconstruction act, were admitted into the Union.
