regard to a new land's
capabilities for pastoral, agricultural, and commercial pursuits; in
those days it was customary, with a large portion of the British public,
at any rate, to expect sailors to tell stories

Of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,

and to relate other particulars likely to arrest the attention and
excite the imagination. Men then sailed to unknown lands, peopled by
unknown barbarians, and their adventures in strange and mysterious
countries were clothed in a romance which has been almost completely
dispelled by the telegraph, the newspaper press, cheap books, and rapid
transit, and by the utilitarian ideas which have swept over the world.

It was largely to meet the public taste for something wonderful and
striking that John Rutherford's story of adventures in New Zealand saw
the light of publicity. In fairness to the original editor and the
publisher, however, it should be stated that the story was given also as
a means of supplying interesting information in regard to a country and
a race of which very little was then known. It was embodied in a book of
400 pages, entitled "The New Zealanders," published in 1830, for the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, by the famous publisher,
Charles Knight.

He was a versatile, talented, and ambitious man; but all his ambitions
ran in the direction of the public good. From the time of his early
manhood, he wished to become a public instructor. At first he tried to
achieve his end by means of journalism, which he entered in 1812, by
reporting Parliamentary debates for "The Globe" and "The British Press,"
two London journals. Later on he started a publishing business in
London. Dealing only with instructive subjects, he established "Knight's
Quarterly Magazine," and other periodicals, to which he was one of the
prominent contributors.

He was not a business man, and in 1828 he was overwhelmed by financial
difficulties. In the meantime he had become acquainted with the
brilliant but erratic Lord Brougham, who had completed arrangements for
putting into operation one of his great enterprises for educating the
masses. This was the establishment of the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge. It began a series of publications under the title of
"The Library of Entertaining Knowledge," which Knight published. The
first volume, written by Knight himself, was "The Mena