

This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

                       CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

                                * * * * *





                                WANDERINGS
                                    IN
                              SOUTH AMERICA.


                                    BY
                            CHARLES WATERTON.

                          _WITH AN INTRODUCTION_
                                   _BY_
                          _NORMAN MOORE_, _M.D._

                           [Picture: Medallion]

                       CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
                       _LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE_.
                                  1891.




INTRODUCTION.


Plutarch, the most famous biographer of ancient times, is of opinion that
the uses of telling the history of the men of past ages are to teach
wisdom, and to show us by their example how best to spend life.  His
method is to relate the history of a Greek statesman or soldier, then the
history of a Roman whose opportunities of fame resembled those of the
Greek, and finally to compare the two.  He points out how in the same
straits the one hero had shown wisdom, the other imprudence; and that he
who had on one occasion fallen short of greatness had on another
displayed the highest degree of manly virtue or of genius.  If Plutarch's
method of teaching should ever be followed by an English biographer, he
will surely place side by side and compare two English naturalists,
Gilbert White and Charles Waterton.  White was a clergyman of the Church
of England, educated at Oxford.  Waterton was a Roman Catholic country
gentleman, who received his education in a Jesuit college.  White spent
his life in the south of England, and never travelled.  Waterton lived in
the north of England, and spent more than ten years in the Forests of
Guiana.  With all these points of difference, the two naturalists were
men of the same kind, and whose lives both teach the same lesson.  They
are examples to show that if a man will but look carefully round him in
the country his every-day walk may supply him with