APPENDIX A 345 



Exactly as a good archaeologist may not be competent to speak of cur- 

 rent social or political problems, so a man who has done capital work 

 as a tourist observer in little-visited cities and along remote highways 

 must beware of regarding himself as being thereby rendered fit for 

 genuine wilderness work or competent to pass judgment on the men 

 who do such work. To cross the Andes on mule-back along the regu- 

 lar routes is a feat comparable to the feats of the energetic tourists 

 who by thousands traverse the mule trails in out-of-the-way nooks of 

 Switzerland. An ordinary trip on the highway portions of the Ama- 

 zon, Paraguay, or Orinoco in itself no more qualifies a man to speak of 

 or to take part in exploring unknown South American rivers than a trip 

 on the lower Saint Lawrence qualifies a man to regard himself as an 

 expert in a canoe voyage across Labrador or the Barren Grounds west 

 of Hudson Bay. 



A hundred years ago, even seventy or eighty years ago, before the 

 age of steamboats and railroads, it was more difficult than at present 

 to define the limits between this class and the next; and, moreover, in 

 defining these limits I emphatically disclaim any intention of thereby 

 attempting to establish a single standard of value for books of travel. 

 Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" is to me the best book of the kind ever 

 written; it is one of those classics which decline to go into artificial cate- 

 gories, and which stand by themselves; and yet Darwin, with his usual 

 modesty, spoke of it as in effect a yachting voyage. Humboldt's work 

 had a profound effect on the thought of the civilized world; his trip was 

 one of adventure and danger; and yet it can hardly be called explora- 

 tion proper. He visited places which had been settled and inhabited 

 for centuries and traversed places which had been travelled by civi- 

 lized men for years before he followed in their footsteps. But these 

 places were in Spanish colonies, and access to them had been forbidden 

 by the mischievous and intolerant tyranny — ecclesiastical, political, and 

 economic — which then rendered Spain the most backward of European 

 nations; and Humboldt was the first scientific man of intellectual in- 

 dependence who had permission to visit them. To this day many 

 of his scientific observations are of real value. Bates came to the 

 Amazon just before the era of Amazonian steamboats. He never went 

 off the native routes of ordinary travel. But he was a devoted and 

 able naturalist. He lived an exceedingly isolated, primitive, and labori- 

 ous life for eleven years. Now, half a century after it was written, his 



