MR. WATERTON IN GUIANA.
No man, perhaps, in recent times has seen more remarkable adventures than Mr. Charles Waterton, the eccentric naturalist, whose narratives of his "Wanderings" in the wild and unfrequented forests of South America, were published about forty years since. As with Bruce and other travellers, many of Mr. Waterton's stories of adventure were at first received with incredulity and ridicule; but the public have since become better acquainted with this original observer of nature; and few now doubt that his narratives are fully entitled to credit.
Though an English gentleman of fortune, Mr. Waterton in pursuit of his favourite studies of birds, animals, and other natural objects, determined to encounter the perils of travel in the forests of Guiana, that pestilential region of South America, whose name, in the traveller's ear, carries associations of fever and death. His first journey was undertaken in 1812, and its chief object was to collect specimens of the famous Wourali poison, with which the native Indians tip their arrows, and the nature of which was of some interest to science. To travel through the wilds of Demarara and Essequibo on foot, would have been impossible. The tour would exhaust the wayfarer in his attempts to wade through the swamps, and the mosquitoes at night would entirely deprive him of sleep. The only way was by canoe up the river, on which he soon found himself moving through an unbroken range of forest, covering
