Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824

Abstract

THE reading world will feel grateful to both author and publisher for this handsome edition of one of our classical books of travel and natural history; while those who are already familiar with the work will read with interest and pleasure the excellent biographical notice of Waterton here given. We have first a sketch of his school and college life, when his taste for natural history got him into many scrapes; but we learn that the Jesuit fathers at Stonyhurst wisely utilised his irrepressible love of animals by making him rat-catcher and general vermin-killer to the establishment. We next find him travelling on the Continent, where he had a narrow escape of dying of the plague at Malaga. He visited Gibraltar, and saw a whole colony of the well-known apes which were then far more abundant than now. He speculates on the “tremendous convulsion of nature”which had opened the channel of the Straits, observing that—”if apes had been on Gibraltar when the sudden shock occurred, these unlucky mimickers of man would have seen their late intercourse with Africa quite at an end”—a passage which recalls to us those extreme catastrophist doctrines in geology which are now happily extinct

Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824.

With Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds, &c., for Cabinets of Natural History. By Charles Waterton. New Edition. Edited, with Biographical Introduction and Explanatory Index, by the Rev. J. G. Wood. With 100 Illustrations. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879.)