346 APPENDIX A 



"Naturalist on the Amazon" is as interesting and valuable as It ever 

 was, and no book since written has in any way supplanted it. 



Travel of the third category includes the work of the true wilderness 

 explorers who add to our sum of geographical knowledge and of the 

 scientific men who, following their several bents, also work in the un- 

 trodden wilds. Colonel Rondon and his associates have done much 

 in the geographical exploration of unknown country, and Cherrie and 

 Miller have penetrated and lived for months and years in the wastes, 

 on their own resources, as incidents to their mammalogical and ornitho- 

 logical work. Professor Farrabee, the anthropologist, is a capital 

 example of the man who does this hard and valuable type of work. 



An immense amount of this true wilderness work, geographical and 

 zoological, remains to be done in South America. It can be accom- 

 plished with reasonable thoroughness only by the efforts of very many 

 different workers, each in his own special field. It is desirable that 

 here and there a part of the work should be done in outline by such a 

 geographic and zoological reconnoissance as ours; we would, for ex- 

 ample, be very grateful for such work in portions of the interior of the 

 Guianas, on the headwaters of the Xingu, and here and there along 

 the eastern base of the Andes. 



But as a rule the work must be specialized; and in its final shape it 

 must be specialized everywhere. The first geographical explorers of the 

 untrodden wilderness, the first wanderers who penetrate the wastes where 

 they are confronted with starvation, disease, and danger and death in 

 every form, cannot take with them the elaborate equipment necessary 

 in order to do the thorough scientific work demanded by modern scien- 

 tific requirements. This is true even of exploration done along the 

 courses of unknown rivers; it is more true of the exploration, which 

 must in South America become increasingly necessary, done across 

 country, away from the rivers. 



The scientific work proper of these early explorers must be of a some- 

 what preliminary nature; in other words the most difficult and there- 

 fore ordinarily the most important pieces of first-hand exploration are 

 precisely those where the scientific work of the accompanying cartog- 

 rapher, geologist, botanist, and zoologist must be furthest removed 

 from finality. The zoologist who works to most advantage in the wil- 

 derness must take his time, and therefore he must normally follow in 

 the footsteps of, and not accompany, the first explorers. The man who 



