LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4064066158408

Table of Contents

       FOREWORD

       I

       JUNGLE PEACE

       II

       SEA-WRACK

       III

       ISLANDS

       IV

       THE POMEROON TRAIL

       V

       A HUNT FOR HOATZINS

       VI

       HOATZINS AT HOME

       VII

       A WILDERNESS LABORATORY

       VIII

       THE CONVICT TRAIL

       IX

       WITH ARMY ANTS "SOMEWHERE" IN THE JUNGLE

       X

       A YARD OF JUNGLE

       XI

       JUNGLE NIGHT

       INDEX

       Modern Library of the World's Best Books

       COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN

       THE MODERN LIBRARY

FOREWORD

       Table of Contents

      Mr. Beebe's volume is one of the rare books which represent a positive addition to the sum total of genuine literature. It is not merely a "book of the season" or "book of the year"; it will stand on the shelves of cultivated people, of people whose taste in reading is both wide and good, as long as men and women appreciate charm of form in the writings of men who also combine love of daring adventure with the power to observe and vividly to record the things of strange interest which they have seen.

      Nothing like this type of book was written until within the last century and a half. Books of this kind can only be produced in a refined, cultivated, civilized society. In rude societies there may be much appreciation of outdoor life, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing for adventurous wandering, but the appreciation and joy are inarticulate; for in such societies the people who write are generally not the people who act, and they express emotions by words as conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the popular poetry which has come down to us from early times, in the ballads of Britain and France, and the folk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there are occasional lines which bring before us the song birds in Spring, in the merry greenwood, or the great flocks of water fowl on the ponds of the plains of green grass; but they are merely a few words of incidental description of the land through which the hero rides to foray and battle. We do not pass much beyond this stage even with Chaucer and the Minnesingers; and although the heroes of the Nibelungenlied were mighty hunters, those who described their deeds knew nothing of the game, even of their own forests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotion to the bolder forms of the chase was a passion; and Kings and Queens of Memphis and Thebes who with absorbed and intelligent curiosity sought for information about the life of far-off lands; but their laborious writings, if they did not deal with business contracts, were generally concerned only with boastful annals or religious ritual.

      Hitherto there have been only two periods of Western history in which both the art of expression, and the breadth of interest among cultivated men, grew to a point which permitted the cultivated man to turn back to the life of the open which his inarticulate ancestor had gradually abandoned, and to enjoy, appreciate, and describe it.

      One of these periods included the society which enjoyed Theocritus and the society which applauded the country poems of Virgil. The other includes our own time, and may roughly be said to have begun when the rise of writers like Pope showed that English eighteenth century society had at last regained the level of the ancient society which enjoyed Cicero and Horace and Pliny; in France the advance had been more rapid.

      It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that there appeared (in primitive form, of course, as with all early types) "nature books" and books of natural history, big game hunting and adventures in out-of-the-way lands. In the Middle Ages there had been many "beastiaries," in which the natural history was for the most part fabulous; and many French and German, and some Italian, Spanish, and English hunting books, which were for the most part as stiff and technical as treatises on farriery.

      But Bruce and Le Vaillant at last foreshadowed the wilderness—wanderers, half explorers, half big game hunters, of our own day; with Gilbert White, there appeared the first book of literary work by a stay-at-home lover of nature and natural history; and a century ago Waterton's "Wanderings" marked the beginning of the literature wherein field naturalists who are also men of letters and men of action have described for us the magic and interest, the terror and beauty of the far-off wilds where nature gives peace to bold souls and inspires terror in the mind.

      Gilbert White and Waterton added in new ways to the sum of achievement of men of letters. Each made a contribution to literature as new and distinctive as the Idylls of Theocritus—it is not necessary to compare the worth of two kinds of literary work, and in speaking of Theocritus I am making

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