IF ANY SINGLE MOTIVE could be selected as the driving force behind that remarkable series of maritime explorations which were conducted in America during the first decades of the sixteenth century, it might very well be the desire to find a passage through the “American Nuisance.” As soon as it became apparent to navigators and cosmographers that the lands discovered by Columbus on his first three voyages were not the outposts of the East, the crown of Spain and its subjects bent every effort to find a way through or around these new and inconvenient discoveries to the Spice Islands and the markets of India and China. At about the same time that Columbus discovered the mainland of South America, Vasco de Gama reached Calicut by way of the Cape of Good Hope. His glowing accounts of the wealth awaiting exploitation in India extended the hopes of both Spain and Portugal that an interoceanic passage might be found.

REATION AND CRITICISM, in literature, are two complementary activities. Once I asked a poet what was the meaning of one of his poems, and his answer was this: “I don’t know. Such a task belongs to you, the critics, not to us, the poets.”

Modern aesthetics is dominated by the conception that art is nothing but a question of expression and does not have any reference to communication. This is a consequence of the sway that Hegel’s philosophy continues to exert over the modern world.

THE SPANISH AMERICAN WARS for independence abounded in events of which novels are born. Among them is the heroic and herculean crossing of the southern Andes by the Argentine general, José de San Martín, and his army to crush Spanish rule in Chile. San Martín’s preparations in Mendoza on the eastern side of the Andes in present Argentina, in which almost insurmountable obstacles had to be overcome, merit in themselves much more attention than they have received from historians.

ON APRIL 11, 1859, during the Mexican War of the Reform, the liberal forces of Santos Degollado were defeated at Tacubaya by the conservative forces under the command of General Márquez. Among the prisoners taken by the conservatives were several young physicians who were ordered shot by the conservative command. One of the physicians was Juan Díaz Covarrubias. The specific source of the command is obscure, but its infamy is clear; it has lived as a shameful chapter in Mexican history, and it has granted Díaz Covarrubias the glory of the man who might have been.