Wanderings in South America

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Charles Waterton. Wanderings in South America

Wanderings in South America

Table of Contents

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

WANDERINGS IN SOUTH AMERICA

FIRST JOURNEY

REMARKS

SECOND JOURNEY

THIRD JOURNEY

FOURTH JOURNEY

ON PRESERVING BIRDS FOR CABINETS OF NATURAL HISTORY

GLOSSARY

INDEX

Отрывок из книги

Charles Waterton

Published by Good Press, 2019

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Step a few paces aside and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now lie on the ground in sad confusion, one upon the other, all shattered and fungus-grown and a prey to millions of insects which are busily employed in destroying them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will it recover? No, it cannot; Nature has already run her course, and that healthy-looking branch is only as a fallacious good symptom in him who is just about to die of a mortification when he feels no more pain, and fancies his distemper has left him; it is as the momentary gleam of a wintry sun's ray close to the western horizon. See! while we are speaking a gust of wind has brought the tree to the ground and made room for its successor.

Come farther on and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it wears. The bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it, and they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its branches which, like the distempers vice brings into the human frame, rob it of all its health and vigour. They have shortened its days, and probably in another year they will finally kill it, long before Nature intended that it should die.

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