This volume was written when the writer's soul was sick of the carnage which has turned the soil of Northern France into a red desert of horror. To him the jungle seemed peaceful, and the underlying war among its furtive dwellers but a small thing compared to the awful contest raging among the most highly civilized of the nations of mankind. It is the same feeling that makes strong men, who have sickened of the mean and squalid injustice of so much of life in the centres of material progress, turn with longing to the waste places where no paths penetrate the frowning or smiling forests and no keels furrow the lonely rivers.
The jungle he herein describes is that of Guiana; and in the introductory chapters he gives cameos of what one sees sailing southward through the lovely islands where the fronds of the palms thrash endlessly as the warm trade blows. He knows well and intimately Malaysia and the East Indian islands, and Ceylon and Farther India and mid-China and the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas. All of these he will some time put before us, in volumes not one of which can be spared from the library of any man who loves life and literature. This is the first of these volumes. In it are records of extraordinary scientific interest, in language which has all the charm of an essay of Robert Louis Stevenson. He tells of bird and beast and plant and insect; of the hoatzin, a bird out of place in the modern world, a bird which comes down unchanged from a time when birds merely fluttered instead of flying—and had only recently learned to flutter instead of gliding. Whatever he touches he turns into the gold of truth rightly interpreted and vividly set forth—as witness his extraordinary account of the sleeping parlor of certain gorgeous tropic butterflies.
If I had space I would like to give an abstract of the whole book. As it is I merely advise all who love good books, very good books, at once to get this book of Mr. Beebe.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
Reprinted from the New York Times. Review of Books.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | [Jungle Peace] | 3 |
| II. | [Sea-wrack] | 5 |
| III. | [Islands] | 33 |
| IV. | [The Pomeroon Trail] | 66 |
| V. | [A Hunt for Hoatzins] | 92 |
| VI. | [Hoatzins at Home] | 123 |
| VII. | [A Wilderness Laboratory] | 140 |
| VIII. | [The Convict Trail] | 177 |
| IX. | [With Army Ants "Somewhere in the Jungle] | 211 |
| X. | [A Yard of Jungle] | 239 |
| XI. | [Jungle Night] | 263 |
| [Index] | 295 | |