LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 57 



and he set sail for New York in 1824, He was delighted with the 

 people and their institutions, and says, in one of his letters, that, in 

 his opinion, no Englishman's education is complete till he has been 

 to the United States of America. He went on to Canada, returned 

 to the States, proceeded to. the West Indies, and ended by re-visiting 

 his favourite haunts in Guiana, where he renewed his old pursuits. 



He got back to England in 1825, and in the same year he pub- 

 lished the history of his travels, under the title of " Wanderings in 

 South America, the North- West of the United States, and the 

 Antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824." The pharisees 

 of Natural Science stigmatised the author for an unscientific amateur, 

 because he did not belong to any of their trades'-unions, because he 

 had not disfigured his vigorous, idiomatic English with the jargon of 

 systematists, and because he had studied nature in the forest, and 

 not according to their vain traditions. They had overlaid the 

 beautiful architecture of the animal world with a plaster of their own 

 fabrication, and every one who laboured to unveil the true temple 

 was, in their eyes, a rude, untutored Goth, who had not been 

 initiated into the mysteries of academic technicalities and artificial 

 systems. Few things are easier than to feign an hypothesis; nothing 

 is more difficult than to establish a law of nature ; and many in 

 every generation aspire to the honours which belong to the discoverer 

 on the strength of the ephemeral fallacies of the theoriser. 



A more general objection was made to the adventure with the 

 cayman, which critics of little perspicacity thought fabulous. Men 

 of weak nerves do not plunge into primeval forests, and spend years 

 in tracking wild beasts and serpents through tangled wilds. In such 

 situations an admixture of the romantic is natural, and the want of 

 it becomes the marvellous. The peculiarity of Waterton is, that he 

 forebore to recount his inevitable perils. He pointed out that the 

 dangers were far less than imagination would picture ; he mentioned 

 his severe illnesses with callous brevity, and was silent upon a thou- 

 sand risks and difficulties which travellers are wont to relate with 

 fond complacency. The sole occasion on which he departed from 

 his rule was in the two or three battles he waged to procure perfect 

 specimens, and he gave the particulars because they were connected 

 in his mind with his Natural History, and not with his personal 



