and wonder.”  But “the most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature—­with absolute uncontaminated savages!... and the surprise of it was that I did not expect to be at all so surprised....  These true wild Indians of the Uaupes ... had nothing that we call clothes; they had peculiar ornaments, tribal marks, etc.; they all carried tools or weapons of their own manufacture....  But more than all, their whole aspect and manner was different—­they were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing to do with white men or their ways; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller, and, except the few that were known to my companion, paid no attention whatever to us, mere strangers of an alien race!  In every detail they were original and self-sustaining as are the wild animals of the forest, absolutely independent of civilisation....  I could not have believed that there would have been so much difference in the aspect of the same people in their native state and when living under European supervision.  The true denizen of the Amazonian forest, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be forgotten.”

The foregoing “impressions” recall forcibly those expressed by Darwin in similar terms at the close of his “Journal”:  “Delight ... is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.  The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage ... the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration.  A paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood ... yet within the recesses ... a universal silence appears to reign ... such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he (a naturalist) can ever hope to experience again,"[8] And in another place:  “Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none can exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; ... temples filled with the various productions of the God of Nature; ... no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body."[9]

In complete contrast to the forest, the bare, treeless, and uninhabited plains of Patagonia “frequently crossed before” Darwin’s eyes.  Why, he could not understand, except that, being so “boundless,” they left “free scope for the imagination.”

As these travels,[10] undertaken at comparatively the same age, represent the foundation upon which their scientific work and theories were based during the long years which followed, a glance at the conditions governing the separate expeditions—­both mental and physical—­may be of some value.  The most obvious difference lies, perhaps, in the fact that Darwin was free from the thought of having to “pay his way” by the immediate result