of exploring work to be done in South America, as hard, as dangerous, and almost as important as any that has already been done; work such as has recently been done, or is now being done, by men and women such as Haseman, Farrabee, and Miss Snethlage.  The collecting naturalists who go into the wilds and do first-class work encounter every kind of risk and undergo every kind of hardship and exertion.  Explorers and naturalists of the right type have open to them in South America a field of extraordinary attraction and difficulty.  But to excavate ruins that have already long been known, to visit out-of-the-way towns that date from colonial days, to traverse old, even if uncomfortable, routes of travel, or to ascend or descend highway rivers like the Amazon, the Paraguay, and the lower Orinoco—­all of these exploits are well worth performing, but they in no sense represent exploration or adventure, and they do not entitle the performer, no matter how well he writes and no matter how much of real value he contributes to human knowledge, to compare himself in anyway with the real wilderness wanderer, or to criticise the latter.  Such a performance entails no hardship or difficulty worth heeding.  Its value depends purely on observation, not on action.  The man does little; he merely records what he sees.  He is only the man of the beaten routes.  The true wilderness wanderer, on the contrary, must be a man of action as well as of observation.  He must have the heart and the body to do and to endure, no less than the eye to see and the brain to note and record.

Let me make it clear that I am not depreciating the excellent work of so many of the men who have not gone off the beaten trails.  I merely wish to make it plain that this excellent work must not be put in the class with that of the wilderness explorer.  It is excellent work, nevertheless, and has its place, just as the work of the true explorer has its place.  Both stand in sharpest contrast with the actions of those alleged explorers, among whom Mr. Savage Landor stands in unpleasant prominence.

From the Sepotuba rapids our course at the outset lay westward.  The first day’s march away from the river lay through dense tropical forest.  Away from the broad, beaten route every step of a man’s progress represented slashing a trail with the machete through the tangle of bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers.  There were palms of new kinds, very tall, slender, straight, and graceful, with rather short and few fronds.  The wild plantains, or pacovas, thronged the spaces among the trunks of the tall trees; their boles were short, and their broad, erect leaves gigantic; they bore brilliant red-and-orange flowers.  There were trees whose trunks bellied into huge swellings.  There were towering trees with buttressed trunks, whose leaves made a fretwork against the sky far overhead.  Gorgeous red-and-green trogons, with long tails, perched motionless on the lower branches and uttered a loud, thrice-repeated whistle.  We heard the calling of the false bellbird, which is gray instead of white like the true bellbirds; it keeps among the very topmost branches.  Heavy rain fell shortly after we reached our camping-place.