EZRA CORNELL I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. INTRODUCTION My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva under my windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun into the great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays and the old granite fortress where lie the bones of the Romanoff Czars.
This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. P.S.--Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until the present date. A. D. W. CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N.Y., August 15, 1895....More >< Less