Travel in the Bernese Oberland

to hold before him the closed and self-existing little land of the praised Bernese Alps in its own description, and to have together in one volume, more compactly, what is just there to be observed, just there to be enjoyed. We therefore collect, not without hope of some thanks, first in this introduction what would indeed largely have to concern the traveler to the Swiss mountains as a whole, but which at times seems particularly beneficial as preparation for a journey to our Bernese Oberland; and then, in the presentation of those regions themselves, we lead with the greatest possible accuracy to everything we have noticed up to this day of things worth seeing or knowing, or have read below, as far as a few of my own travels and some resources, which the preface mentions, have informed us about these things for the time being. We only want to be of service to the traveler in general, not to the artist, the scholar, the statesman, the farmer, or any other special class of people. Only to the traveler, but admittedly to the educated one who travels with open eyes, with an open mind, with an open heart, do I wish to be useful; and not at home, compared with Scheuchzer, Andreä, Bourrit, de Luc, Saussure, Coxe, Ramond, Storr, Meiners, or any other of the many and praised travel writers of our fatherland; no, on the spot, or in the evening at the inn, I would like to be read without effort, perhaps as one would hear a wanderer if he had come along the same path one has just completed, or is about to start.