MEMOIR OP LE VAILLANT. 
23 
discoveries than to write books, M. Le Yaillant was 
under the necessity of employing the pen of an 
amanuensis, M. Casimir Yaron, to revise and amend 
the style of this second publication. Yaron was 
himself a traveller and a poet; and it was very 
currently believed at the time that he had performed 
the task of editing M. Le Yaillant’s Second Journey. 
This, however, is a mistake, and the error has been 
satisfactorily explained. Being a foreigner by birth, 
and having spent the years of his boyhood among 
the forests of Guiana, Mons. Le Yaillant never had 
a very pure or classical acquaintance with the French 
tongue. The early age at which ho visited Africa, 
and his long separation from all European inter- 
course, tended still more to obliterate his recollec- 
tions of the language, which in fact he had nearly 
altogether forgotten. And although he afterwards 
recovered his knowledge of it, so far as to speak it 
with facility, yet it was hardly to be expected from 
one in his circumstances that he could write it with 
elegance or correctness. It was to remedy these 
defects alone that he engaged the pen of a stranger 
to revise his manuscripts, and take charge of them 
while passing through the press. There is nothing 
in this substitution of the preliminary aid of a 
friend that can be deemed discreditable to the me- 
mory of either party ; and it was to this extent and 
no more that the services of M. Yaron were ren- 
dered. The incorrectness of style here adverted to 
is perceptible in the other works on Natural History 
