The artist or the writer who visits South America to-day finds it as a diamond of a hundred facets, and his main difficulty is to select those points upon which to concentrate his gaze. So vast is the subject, so full of romance, glamour, pulsating life, and world possibilities that not one book but many must be written upon it before the reader can form the barest idea of the well-nigh illimitable nature of the theme. Hence an author who offers any contribution to so vast a study has no need to excuse himself for his apparent temerity, provided he sets on record some new point of view or chronicles his impressions of paths not too well known. Even if he fails in either or both these aims his work is justified if it contains individual conceptions of the myriad wonders which the continent discloses to the seeing eye. For this far-reaching stretch of earth is the last to be really explored and civilised by Western man. Compared with many portions of it, the forests of Central Africa, the plateaus of Middle Asia, and the deserts of Australia, are as open books. It is only South America to-day, or, to be more correct, a great part of it that is “a field enclosed, a fountain sealed.” Consequently any contribution which aims at familiarising stay-at-home folk with the marvellous cities, the impressive scenery, the rich products, and the limitless resources of this mighty territory has surely a title to consideration. The present writer claims to be neither an explorer nor a political theorist, nor, although profoundly impressed with the magnificence of South America’s destiny, has he attempted to forecast the lines along which that destiny will shape itself. His aim has been far less ambitious, much more simple. Whatever he saw in the country or amongst the people that interested him he has endeavoured to transcribe with interest for the benefit of others. Even so he submits that the ensuing pages will give the general reader a fair conspectus of the rise and development of South America from those far-off days when it was discovered, subjugated, and colonised by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores to the present day, where a dozen independent Republics have their seats of government in cities where once the flags of the conquerors waved.