Introduction X11 
After his return from Central America, his services were 
in great request as a consulting mining engineer, and the 
succeeding years of his life were spent in almost continual 
travel: over all parts of Great Britain, to North and South 
Russia, Siberia, the Kirghiz Steppes, Mexico, and the 
United States. It was on one of his annual visits to 
Colorado that he was seized with sudden sickness and died 
on September 21, 1878, at the early age of forty-five. 
Thomas Belt was an accurate and intelligent observer 
possessed of the valuable faculty of wonder at whatever is 
new or strange or beautiful in nature, and the equally 
valuable habit of seeking a reason for all he saw. Having 
found or imagined one, he went on to make fresh observa- 
tions, and sought out new facts to see how they accorded 
with his supposed cause of the phenomena. The Naturalist 
an Nicaragua has therefore a value and a charm quite in- 
dependent of the particular district it describes. As a 
mere book of travel it is surpassed by scores of other works. 
The country and the people of Nicaragua are too much 
like other parts of tropical Spanish America, with their 
dull, lazy inhabitants, to possess any novelty. There is 
little in the book that can be called adventure, and still 
less of geographical discovery. 
And yet, the many and highly diversified phases in which 
life presents itself in the tropics enabled the skilled 
naturalist to fill a volume with a series of episodes, experi- 
ences, and speculations of which the reader will never tire. 
His keen powers of observation and active intellect were 
applied to various branches of scientific inquiry with un- 
flagging ardour; and he had the faculty of putting the ° 
results of these inquiries in a clear, direct form, rendered the 
more attractive by its simplicity and absence of any effort 
at fine writing. He does not obtrude his own personality, 
and, like all genuine men, he forgets ‘“‘self’’ over his 
subject. Instead of informing us whether or not he re- 
ceived “‘ the salary of an ambassador and the treatment 
of a gentleman,” he scatters before us, broadcast, facts 
interesting and novel, valuable hints for future research, 
and generalisations which amply repay a close study. Not 
alone the zoologist, the botanist, the geologist, but the 
antiquarian, the ethnologist, the social philosopher, and the 
