of the country from the
pebbles they picked up in a day's ride.

I remember some striking words addressed to me, before I set out on my
travels, by a wise man, since dead. "You are going to spend two years in
the United States," said he. "Now just tell me,--do you expect to
understand the Americans by the time you come back? You do not: that is
well. I lived five-and-twenty years in Scotland, and I fancied I
understood the Scotch; then I came to England, and supposed I should
soon understand the English. I have now lived five-and-twenty years
here, and I begin to think I understand neither the Scotch nor the
English."

What is to be done? Let us first settle what is not to be done.

The traveller must deny himself all indulgence of peremptory decision,
not only in public on his return, but in his journal, and in his most
superficial thoughts. The experienced and conscientious traveller would
word the condition differently. Finding peremptory decision more trying
to his conscience than agreeable to his laziness, he would call it not
indulgence, but anxiety; he enjoys the employment of collecting
materials, but would shrink from the responsibility of judging a
community.

The traveller must not generalize on the spot, however true may be his
apprehension--however firm his grasp, of one or more facts. A raw
English traveller in China was entertained by a host who was
intoxicated, and a hostess who was red-haired; he immediately made a
note of the fact that all the men in China were drunkards, and all the
women red-haired. A raw Chinese traveller in England was landed by a
Thames waterman who had a wooden leg. The stranger saw that the wooden
leg was used to stand in the water with, while the other was high and
dry. The apparent economy of the fact struck the Chinese; he saw in it
strong evidence of design, and wrote home that in England one-legged men
are kept for watermen, to the saving of all injury to health, shoe, and
stocking, from standing in the river. These anecdotes exhibit but a
slight exaggeration of the generalizing tendencies of many modern
travellers. They are not so much worse than some recent tourists' tales,
as they are better than the old narratives of "men whose heads do grow
beneath their shoulders."

Natural philosophers do not dream of generalizing with any such speed as
that used by the observers of men; yet they might do it with more
safety, at the risk of an incalculably smaller mischief. The