THE MODERN LIBRARY
OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS
JUNGLE PEACE
Turn to the end of this volume
for a complete list of titles
in the Modern Library
[i]
JUNGLE PEACE
BY
WILLIAM BEEBE
Foreword by
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THE MODERN LIBRARY
PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK
[ii]
Copyright, 1920, by
HENRY HOLT & CO.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Bound for THE MODERN LIBRARY by H. Wolff
[iii]
TO
COLONEL and MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I OFFER THIS VOLUME WITH DEEPEST FRIENDSHIP
[iv]
NOTE
With three exceptions these chapters have appeared in the pagesof The Atlantic Monthly, and I publish them through the kindness ofthe Editor, Ellery Sedgwick. "Hoatzins at Home" is adapted froma title in my Tropical Wild Life, Volume I, published by the NewYork Zoölogical Society, which deals with the more technical resultsof study at the Research Station. The illustrations are from myown photographs, except the frontispiece and those facing pages162, 186, and 268, which were taken by Paul G. Howes. All thechapters dealing with the jungle relate to Bartica District, BritishGuiana, except X, which refers to Pará at the mouth of theAmazon.
[v]
FOREWORD
Mr. Beebe's volume is one of the rare books which representa positive addition to the sum total of genuine literature.It is not merely a "book of the season" or "book ofthe 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 thewritings of men who also combine love of daring adventurewith the power to observe and vividly to record the thingsof strange interest which they have seen.
Nothing like this type of book was written until withinthe last century and a half. Books of this kind can onlybe produced in a refined, cultivated, civilized society. Inrude societies there may be much appreciation of outdoorlife, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing for adventurouswandering, but the appreciation and joy are inarticulate;for in such societies the people who write aregenerally not the people who act, and they express emotionsby words as conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics.In the popular poetry which has come down to us fromearly times, in the ballads of Britain and France, and thefolk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there areoccasional lines which bring before us the song birds inSpring, in the merry greenwood, or the great flocks ofwater fowl on the ponds of the plains of green grass; but[vi]they are merely a few words of incidental description ofthe land through which the hero rides to foray and battle.We do not pass much beyond this stage even with Chaucerand the Minnesingers; and although the heroes of theNibelungenlied were mighty hunters, those who describedtheir deeds knew nothing of the game, even of their ownforests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotionto the bolder forms of the chase was a passion; and Kingsand Queens of Memphis and Thebes who with absorbedand intelligent curiosity sought for information about the