[Preface] This book records observations made and impressions formed during a journey through western and southern South America from Panama to Argentina and Brazil via the Straits of Magellan.

[Introduction] Whoever read as a boy the books of old travellers in the Ades, such as Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, or pored over such accounts of the primitive American peoples as are given in Prescott's Conquest of Peru must have longed to visit some day the countries that fired his imagination.

[Chapter 1] South America is bounded at its northern end by an isthmus and at its southern end by a straight.