Scie7ittfic Intelligence — Miscellaneous. 207 



body of the sleeper ; and then the wolves and the bears, and the 

 wild inhabitants of forest and mountain, who regard the traveller as 

 a victim delivered into their hands by God : — ^and should he escape 

 those perils, the wilderness, the pathless wood, where no friendly 

 signpost points the way by which the traveller may return to his 

 caravan, or reach a hospital hut ! All these inconveniences really 

 exist ; but nearness and habit diminish their terrors, as they do 

 those of most scarecrows of this world, of which, while they are yet 

 distant, imagination magnifies the dimensions — as the veteran 

 soldier does not suffer his tranquillity to be disturbed by the whist- 

 ling of a wandering bullet or two, when he is lying by his watchfire 

 quietly consuming his rations, or enjoying his glass, but laughs at 

 the leaden messenger of death, since he knows by experience that 

 for one that reaches its mark a hundred go astray, so the hunter 

 and nomadic naturalist, in his wanderings through forest, and steppe, 

 and mountains, must at once set down whatever perils may attend 

 him among daily occurrences, and they will lose their strangeness, 

 and leave only enough of what is terrible to make them serve as a 

 spice to his ordinary employment, and as a protection against the 

 ennui which more or less, attends every laborious and monotonous 

 occupation. The camping-places which I chose in the forests of 

 Gambora (north-east from Tiflis), were usually in the neighbourhood 

 of one of those streams, which flow down dark mountain ravines into 

 the valleys, and by their gushing and murmuring, their rushing and 

 roaring, continually make known their presence, even where the 

 closeness of the vegetation conceals them from the eye of the thirsty 

 wanderer. Such a mountain torrent was commonly the ariadne 

 thread by which, when the ardour of the chase or of our natural- 

 ist zeal had carried us far away, we contrived to find our way back 

 to our resting-place. 



'•' We generally dispersed singly about the woods, in order to ob- 

 tain a richer booty, and accident would lead the one or the other to 

 a place where the lightness of the wood, the rich soil, the due pro- 

 portion of heat and moisture, had drawn from the earth so magnifi- 

 cent a vegetation — where there was such glorious botanising, such 

 rare butterflies, Hymenoptera, and Diptera, hovering about the 

 flowers, where the Orthoptera in their most gaily decorated ball- 

 dresses, were dancing the polka — where the insect-eating birds were 

 flying about in search of their prey, and the falcons with similar in- 

 tent, keeping watch over them ; and from beneath the rotting 

 branches and trunks of fallen trees, the most exquisite scarabei re- 

 warded the zeal of the seeker. Did our enthusiasm carry us too far 

 from the aforesaid ariadne thread into solitary regions, where there 

 was nothing to be seen but green above, green below, green around 

 in every direction ; where the numerous turnings, rendered necessary 

 by the thickness of the underwood, had completely bewildered us, 

 and there were no marks hewn by the kinshal on the boughs of 



