dships and sufferings endured, the adventures
accomplished, and the perils passed by the crew of the strayed galatea,
would appear as so many fabulous inventions, set forth to stimulate and
gratify a taste for the merely marvellous. Young reader, this is not the
aim of your author, nor does he desire it to be the end. On the
contrary, he claims to draw Nature with a verisimilitude that will
challenge the criticism of the naturalist; though he acknowledges a
predilection for Nature in her wildest aspects,--for scenes least
exposed to the eye of civilization, and yet most exposed to its doubting
incredulity.

There are few country people who have not witnessed the spectacle of a
piece of woodland inundated by the overflow of a neighboring stream.
This flood is temporary; the waters soon subside into their ordinary
channel, and the trees once more appear growing out of _terra firma_,
with the green mead spreading on all sides around them. But a flooded
forest is a very different affair; somewhat similar in character indeed,
but far grander. Not a mere spinney of trees along the bank of a small
stream; but a region extending beyond the reach of vision,--a vast tract
of primeval woods,--the tall trees submerged to their very tops, not for
days, nor weeks, but for months,--ay, some of them forever! Picture to
your mind an inundation of this kind, and you will have some idea of the
Gapo.

Extending for seventeen hundred miles along the banks of the Solimoes,
now wider on the northern, now stretching farther back from the southern
side, this semi-submerged forest is found, its interior almost as
unknown as the crater-like caverns of the moon, or the icy oceans that
storm or slumber round the Poles,--unknown to civilized man, but not
altogether to the savage. The aboriginal of Amazonia, crouching in his
canoe, has pierced this water-land of wonders. He could tell you much
about it that is real, and much that is marvellous,--the latter too
often pronounced fanciful by lettered _savans_. He could tell you of
strange trees that grow there, bearing strange fruits, not to be found
elsewhere,--of wonderful quadrupeds, and _quadrumana_, that exist only
in the Gapo,--of birds brilliantly beautiful, and reptiles hideously
ugly; among the last the dreaded dragon serpent, "Sucuriyu." He could
tell you, moreover, of creatures of his own kind,--if they deserve the
name of man,--who dwell continuously in the flooded forest, making their
hom