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Show 394 found c i t i e s like San Francisco and New York as equally good material for a r t . Muir could not, given the nature of the project, turn such a c o l l e c t i o n into a plea for wild Nature. S t i l l , he was making a new beginning. Like an old patriarch grizzly, he seemed to be awakening in the spring, after a long winter. His growling could be heard here and there in the woods, as throughout these essays he awoke. Sometimes he grumbled in s p i t e of his b e t t e r judgment. For instance, his a t t i t u d e toward tourism was not so optimistic as i t should have been for such a book. At one place he thought he saw i t as "at l e a s t a beginning of our return to nature," where people were " t r a v e l l i n g to better purpose than they knew." But elsewhere he saw t o u r i s t s as merely ridiculous - "the weak and the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental t a x a t i o n . " He growled about the noisy gun-shooting and hallooing crowds who returned from the wilderness, who reported "no birds in the woods or game animals of any kind larger than mosquitoes." Muir wanted to reenter the fray, and remind his fellow Americans of a right view of Nature. Further, his disgust with the h i s t o r y of the West was becoming more consolidated, and he could not repress the cynicism which was present in "Bee P a s t u r e s . " Even as he summarized the "discovery" of North America, he depicted the search in brutal terms: During the l a s t few c e n t u r i e s , when the maps of the world were in great part blank, the search for new |