To those who seek for wildernesses there is not much of interest in Georgetown, save the museum and the botanical garden. Yet there is no doubt that the city is one of the most attractive in the tropics, and when the inhabitants are aroused to a sense of the opportunities which they are throwing away, it will become a famous tourist resort; awakening the country to new life and bringing shekels to the coffers of its merchants. Hotels and mosquitoes are the two keys to the situation—the one to be acquired, the other banished. When this is done, the many popular winter resorts will be hard put to it to retain their lucrative migrants from the North. The inhabitants of Georgetown have one regrettable failing—an unreasoning fear and dread of their own country. They cling to their narrow strip of coastal territory, where they work and play, live and die, many of them without ever having been five miles away from the sea. The majority of the inhabitants of French Guiana are convicts, chained for life to their prisons; here the good people of British Guiana bind themselves with imaginary bonds and picture their wonderful land as teeming with serpents and heaven-knows-what other terrors. [Illustration: FIG. 57. STREET IN GEORGETOWN.] Another unfortunate failing is the firm conviction of some of the influential citizens that there is no truth in the mosquito theory as a cause of malaria and yellow fever. A distinguished English scientist, recently sent to investigate yellow fever in Barbados and British Guiana, was holding up as an example to the citizens of Georgetown the Barbadian custom of keeping fishes in their water cisterns; explaining that the fishes devoured the mosquito larvæ and thus kept down the number of mosquitoes. A Barbadian who chanced to be in the audience interrupted the scientist by saying, “Oh, but that is not the reason they put fishes in the cisterns. It is to make sure the water has not been poisoned by some enemy”! Until the mosquito is exterminated in Georgetown the tourist will prefer to go elsewhere, even though that be to a less beautiful spot. [Illustration: FIG. 58. KISKADEE TYRANT FLYCATCHER.] We were advised to spend all our time in Georgetown, where we might drink pink swizzles (than which no worse medicine exists!) or read in the cool library, or study the natural history of the country impaled on pins or stuffed with cotton (both of which are improving occupations but can be done quite as well in New York). Every moment spent in streets of human making seemed sacrilege when the real wilderness—the wilderness of Waterton, of Schomburgk and of im Thurn—beckoned to us just beyond. Armed with proper letters of introduction and travelling in the name of science, one is treated with all courtesy by Guiana officials. The customs give no trouble, save that one pays a deposit of twelve per cent on cameras, guns and cartridges.