Appendix A 355 



studies and observations of these travellers are essential 

 in order to supplement, and sometimes to correct, those 

 of travellers of the first category; for it is not safe to 

 generalize overmuch about any country merely from a 

 visit to its capital or its chief seaport. These travellers 

 of the second category can give us most interesting and 

 valuable information about quaint little belated cities; 

 about backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who 

 show a mixture of the ideas of savagery with the ideas 

 of an ancient peasantry ; and about rough old highways 

 of travel which in comfort do not differ much from those 

 of mediaeval Europe. The travellers who go up or down 

 the highway rivers that have been travelled for from one 

 to four hundred years — ^rivers like the Paraguay and 

 Parana, the Amazon, the Tapajos, the Madeira, the lower 

 Orinoco — come in this category. They can add little to 

 our geographical knowledge; but if they are competent 

 zoologists or archaeologists, especially if they live or so- 

 journ long in a locality, their work may be invaluable 

 from the scientific standpoint. The work of the archae- 

 ologists among the immeasurably ancient ruins of the low- 

 land forests and the Andean plateaux is of this kind. 

 What Agassiz did for the fishes of the Amazon and what 

 Hudson did for the birds of the Argentine are other in- 

 stances of the work that can thus be done. Burton's 

 writings on the interior of Brazil offer an excellent in- 

 stance of the value of a sojourn or trip of this type, even 

 without any especial scientific object. 



Of course travellers of this kind need to remember 

 that their experiences in themselves do not qualify them 

 to speak as wilderness explorers. Exactly as a good arch- 



