PREFACE LO: THE FIRST) EDITION 
THE following pages have been written in the intervals 
between arduous professional engagements. Begun on the 
Atlantic during my voyage home from Central America, the 
first half relieved the tedium of a long and slow recovery 
from the effects of an accident occurring on board ship. The 
middle of the manuscript found me traversing the high 
passes of the snow-clad Caucasus, where I made acquaintance 
with the Abkassians, in whose language Mr. Hyde Clark 
finds analogies with those of my old friends the Brazilian 
Indians. I now write this brief preface and the last chapter 
of my book (with Bradshaw’s Continental Guide as my only 
book of reference), on my way across the continent to the 
Urals, and beyond, to the country of the nomad Kirghizes 
and the far Altai mountains on the borders of Thibet; and 
when readers receive my work I shall probably have turned 
my face homewards again, and for weeks be speeding across 
the frozen Siberian steppes, wrapped in furs, listening to the 
sleigh bells, and wondering how my book has sped. It is 
full of theories—I trust not unsupported by facts: some 
thought out on the plains of Southern Australia; some 
during many a solitary sleigh drive over frozen lakes in North 
America; some in the great forests of Central and South 
America; some on the wide ocean, with the firmament above 
and below blending together on the horizon; and some, again, 
in the bowels of the earth when seeking for her hidden riches. 
The thoughts are those of a lifetime compressed into a little 
book; and, like the genie of the Arabian tale, imprisoned in 
an urn, they may, when it is opened, grow and magnify, or, 
on the contrary, be kicked back into the sea of oblivion. 
This much is necessary; not to disarm criticism, but to 
excuse myself to those authors whose labours on some of the 
subjects I have treated of I may not have mentioned. I 
have, during my sojourns in England, worked hard to read 
up the literature of the various questions discussed, but I 
I 
