Page:A Forbidden Land - Voyages to the Corea (1880).djvu/17

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viii
PREFACE.

distinct as to make them search for the same somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Himalaya, or amongst the island groups of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Notwithstanding the great pains the author has taken to render his account of the Corea in all respects as complete as possible, no one can be more alive to the many faults and shortcomings which this book still contains. On the other hand, he has been painfully careful to avoid the flight of fiction and imagination so often met with in works of travel, or to write and describe nothing but what he has personally seen and experienced, or knows from undoubted authority to be positively true.

Little need be said of those chapters containing the geographical, historical, and other parts. There exists as yet no foreign map of the Corea which can lay claim to anything like correctness, and for this reason the author has abstained from attaching one to this work. The best in existence, and the one approaching nearest to correctness, is to be found in the last cartographical work published by the late Dr. A. Petermann, of Gotha. Nor is this want likely to be supplied until foreigners are furnished with the opportunity to extend their study to the topography of the country itself.

In the chapters giving an account of the voyages undertaken by him, the author has been compelled to speak more frequently of himself in the first person than he could have desired. For the sake of