70 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY. 



whole earth more accessible, and brings into comparison its 

 remotest portions. 



I have here attempted to indicate, however vaguely, the 

 manner in which the traveller's power of presenting the result 

 of his opportunities of observation, the infusion of a fresh life 

 into the descriptive element of literature, and the variety of 

 the views which are continually opening before us on the vast 

 theatre of the producing and destroying forces, may all tend to 

 enlarge the scientific study of nature and to incite to its pursuit. 

 The writer who, in our German literature, has, according to 

 my feelings, opened the path in this direction with the 

 greatest degree of vigour and success, was my distinguished 

 teacher and friend George Forster. Through him has been 

 commenced a new era of scientific travelling, having for its 

 object the comparative knowledge of nations and of nature 

 in different parts of the earth's surface. Gifted with refined 

 aesthetic feeling, and retaining the fresh and living pictures 

 with which Tahiti and the other fortunate islands of the 

 Pacific had filled his imagination (as in later years that of 

 Charles Darwin) ( 103 ), George Porster was the first grace- 

 fully and pleasingly to depict the different gradations cf 

 vegetation, the relations of climate, and the various articles 

 of food, in their bearing on the habits and manners of different 

 tribes according to their differences of race and of previous 

 habitation. All that can give truth, individuality, and 

 graphic distinctness to the representation of an exotic nature, 

 s united in his writings : not only his excellent account of 

 he second voyage of Captain Cook, but still more his smaller 

 works, contain the germ of much which, at a later period, 

 has been brought to maturity ( 104 ). But, for this noble, 



