Catching Wild Beasts Alive [antikvár]

PREFACEThis book is an extract from my wanderer's years. It contains nothing but what I have myself seen, heard, and experienced.When I first set eyes on a tropical country I was still very young in years, a mere lad, and I deeply felt my lack of education. During the two years I spent at the Volksschule, in the Brigittenau suburb of Vienna, I made a sketchy acquaintance with reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the seventies, geography, or Erdkunde, as they call it nowadays, was not to be found in the curriculum of the schools of the lower classes in Vienna. My natural history also was confined to what I had personally picked up by observation or otherwise on my rambles in the Vienna forest.Subsequently, I visited all the five continents as an acrobat apprentice with the troupe, but the only opportunity for nature study was our journeys from city to city and one country to another. But as at that time I had nothing in my silly little head except professional keenness, it never occurred to me to go in for nature study. It is true that I took a lot of pleasure in fine buildings and good pictures, but there was no one available to show me how to appreciate the beauties of nature and art.Literature was something entirely beyond my ken, and up to my fourteenth year I read indiscriminately boys' shockers, penny dreadfuls, and adventures with Indians.It was not until I had had my first glimpse of primeval forest, jungle, and steppe, that I began to suspect what a wonderful picture of creation they present, and then my lack of education frequently made itself felt most painfully.