To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the time when _Robinson Crusoe_ was my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the Condor, were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls. Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau[1] herborized with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his Canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre[2] discovered a world on a strawberry-plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre,[3] using an arm-chair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room. [Footnote 1: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), author of the _Confessions_, _La Nouvelle Heloise_, etc.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 2: Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), author of _Paul et Virginie_, _La Chaumiere idienne_ and _Etudes de la nature_.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 3: Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852), best known for his _Voyage autour de ma chambre_ (1795).--_Translator's Note_.] This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently, I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply. The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis[4] perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket[5] strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter. [Footnote 4: Cf. _The Life of the Grasshopper_: chaps. vi. to ix.--_Translator's Note_.] [Footnote 5: Cf. _idem_: chap. xvi.--_Translator's Note_.] If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle,[6] the Capricorn, the Geotrupes,[7] the Copris,[8] the Decticus,[9] the Cricket,[10] the Green Grasshopper,[11] in short, with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.