XXVi FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



defects of their qualities. They gathered into stackyards both 

 wheat and tares, and seldom found time to thrash. The type 

 survives afield in the mere collector, and its degenerate sedentary 

 representatives are called compilers. 



III. Just as Buffon represents the climax of the encyclopaedists, 

 and is yet something more, for he thrashed his wheat, so Humboldt, 

 while as ambitious as any encyclopaedist traveller, transcended them 

 all by vitalizing the wealth of impressions which he gathered. He 

 was the general naturalist-traveller, who took all nature for his 

 province, and does not seem to have been embarrassed. Of successful 

 representatives of this type there are few, since Darwin perhaps 

 none. 



IV. Meanwhile Linnaeus had brought order, Cuvier had founded 

 his school of anatomists, Haller had re-organized physiology, the 

 microscope had deepened analysis, and zoology came of age as a 

 specialism. Henceforth travellers' tales were at a discount; even 

 a Humboldt might be contradicted, and platitudinarian narratives 

 of a voyage round the world ceased to find the publisher sympa- 

 thetic or the public appetized. The naturalist-traveller was now 

 a zoologist, or a botanist, or an ornithologist, or an entomologist; 

 at any rate, a specialist. But it was sometimes found profitable to 

 work in companies, as in the case of the Challenger expedition. 



V. Lastly, we find that on the travellers, too, "evolution" cast 

 its spell, and we have Darwin and Wallace as the types of the 

 biological travellers, whose results go directly towards the working 

 out of a cosmology. From Bates and Belt and Brehm there is a 

 long list down to Dr. Hickson, The Naturalist in Celebes, and Mr. 

 Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata. Not, of course, that most 

 are not specialists, but the particular interest of their work is 

 biological or bionomical. 



I have added to this essay a list of some of the most important 

 works of the more recent naturalist -travellers with which I am 

 directly acquainted, being convinced that it is with these that the 

 general, and perhaps also the professional student of natural history 

 should begin, as it is with them that his studies must also end. 

 For, not only do they introduce us, in a manner usually full of 



