INTRODUCTION
TRAVELis the greatest of educators, the greatest of civilizers. To come in contact with men and manners different from those to which we have been accustomed by birth is to broaden the mind; to teach it forbearance, sympathy, wisdom; to rob it of its philistinism; to make it cosmopolitan and not provincial. To come face to face with the great monuments of the past and of the present, to see what man has done and is doing, is to get a new idea of the vastness, the imaginative strength, the creative power of the human mind, to renew your respect for your kind and for yourself, because you belong to that kind. It may teach you your own littleness, indeed, in itself a useful lesson. But it also teaches you the greatness of that aggregate of little individuals to which we give the generic name of man. And to learn this lesson of reverence for man is to kin yourself with what is best and holiest in man.
Horse-power, sails, steam, electricity are all at your bidding to-day, ready harnessed to transport you where you will. If you wish to travel, the world is yours to command. Fictitious heroes have circled it in eighty days; real men and women have accomplished the feat in less time. A little leisure and a little money will enable you to do what a century or so ago would have been impossible to the greatest potentate on earth, with twenty-four hours of leisure every day, and the wealth of Indies at his beck and call.
But if you have not the little leisure, if you have not the little money, you can travel without them. You can travel without passing out of your room, without quitting your chair. The resources of modern science are inexhaustible. Mahomet, though a prophet, had to go to the mountain because the mountain would not come to him. But you need not go to the mountain; modern science will make it come to you. You have but to say the word.
Here, in this book, for example, are one hundred photographs of one hundred of the most famous sights, scenes and monuments in the whole world. To see these sights, these scenes, these monuments, is to attain a liberal education. Now what is seeing? Seeing, the philosopher will tell you, is to have certain waves of light strike your eye and create an impression on your retina of the objects that are in front of you. The retina, in other words, is nothing but a natural camera obscura. And what is a photograph? A photograph is a modern invention whereby, by means of an artificial camera obscura, the sun, the author of all light, is cunningly induced to bind upon paper foreverthe impression made by the actual waves of light set in motion by certain objects. Remember it is not a picture of that object formed by some individual man and blurred by the personality of the individual who made it. It is the actual sight, the actual scene, the actual monument, or what not, just as it would have met your natural retina if you had been there, and simply reflected from the artificial retina into your natural one. The sun is the true realist—faithful, literal, exact. Would we not cheerfully exchange Giotto’s portrait of Dante for a photograph by Sarony, had Sarony and his camera existed in Dante’s day; or Wagner’s Chariot Race for an instantaneous photograph of the great Colosseum, with its surging crowds of humanity? The men and women in Wagner’s masterpiece are vivid and life-like; as types they are faithful and exact, but the instantaneous photograph would give you the very outer form and semblance, the body and almost the soul, of individuals who had once lived, who are now once again living before you. Savages are said to shrink from being photographed, deeming that a part of themselves passes into the picture, and the superstitions of savages are metaphors in which civilized men read a poetical hint of the truth.
Here, then, are one hundred of the greatest of human monuments and the most magnificent of earthly scenes brought into your very presence by the witchery of modern science. The selection has been made with the greatest care so as to be truly representative of all ages, people and climes. Each photograph is accompanied by a pains-taking and accurate description whichbriefly but succinctly sums up the information that the reader needs for his guidance. Here, therefore, is a trip round the world with the services of a guide thrown in, and that trip can be accomplished pleasantly and without fatigue at an expense which is too ridiculously small to mention.
Well may the modern laugh at Mahomet and his mountain, and snap his fingers at Phineas Fogg and Nelly Bly. Eighty days quotha! Seventy? Sixty? Nay, eighty minutes will suffice.