Transcriber’s Note
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AROUND THE WORLD
IN
EIGHTY MINUTES
Photographic Reproductions of the Most Magnificent Edifices,the Most Interesting Remains and the Most BeautifulScenes on the Earth’s Surface
WITH DESCRIPTIVE TEXT
BY
WM. S. WALSH
PHILADELPHIA
HENRY ALTEMUS
1894
Copyrighted, 1894, by Henry Altemus
Altemus’ Bookbindery, Philadelphia
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INTRODUCTION
TRAVEL is the greatest of educators, the greatest of civilizers. To comein contact with men and manners different from those to which we havebeen accustomed by birth is to broaden the mind; to teach it forbearance,sympathy, wisdom; to rob it of its philistinism; to make it cosmopolitanand not provincial. To come face to face with the great monuments of thepast and of the present, to see what man has done and is doing, is to get a newidea of the vastness, the imaginative strength, the creative power of the humanmind, to renew your respect for your kind and for yourself, because you belongto that kind. It may teach you your own littleness, indeed, in itself auseful lesson. But it also teaches you the greatness of that aggregate of littleindividuals to which we give the generic name of man. And to learn thislesson of reverence for man is to kin yourself with what is best and holiestin man.
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Horse-power, sails, steam, electricity are all at your bidding to-day, readyharnessed to transport you where you will. If you wish to travel, the worldis yours to command. Fictitious heroes have circled it in eighty days; realmen and women have accomplished the feat in less time. A little leisure anda little money will enable you to do what a century or so ago would have beenimpossible to the greatest potentate on earth, with twenty-four hours of leisureevery 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, youcan 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 themountain 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 hundredof 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 havecertain waves of light strike your