PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. 805 



rodent, though, it is barely possible that some of them may have 

 stolen a ride on Spanish trading vessels from Central America. 



Water-moles burrow in the banks of several Cuban rivers, and two 

 genera of aquatic mammals have solved the problem of survival : the 

 bayou porpoise and the manatee, both known to the Creoles of the 

 early colonial era, and vaguely even to the first discoverers, since 

 Columbus himself alludes to a " sort of mermaids (sirenas) that half 

 rose from the water and scanned the boat's crew with curious eyes." 



Naturally the manatee is, indeed, by no means a timid creature, 

 but bitter experience has changed its habits since the time when the 

 down-town sportsmen of Santiago used to start in sailboats for the 

 outer estuary and return before night with a week's supply of manatee 

 meat. The best remaining hunting grounds are the reed shallows 

 of Samana Bay (San Domingo) and the deltas of the Hayti swamp 

 rivers. Old specimens are generally as wary as the Prybilof fur seal 

 that dive out of sight at the first glimpse of a sail; still, their slit-eyed 

 youngsters are taken alive often enough, to be kept as public pets in 

 many town ponds, where they learn to come to a whistle and waddle 

 ashore for a handful of cabbage leaves. 



Fish otters have been caught in the lagoons of Puerto Principe 

 (central Cuba) and near Cape Tiburon, on the south coast of San 

 Domingo, the traveler Gerstaecker saw a kind of " bushy-tailed dor- 

 mouse, too small to be called a squirrel." 



But the last four hundred years have enlarged the list of in- 

 digenous mammals in more than one sense, and the Chevalier de Saint- 

 Mery should not have been criticised for describing the bush dog of 

 Hayti as a " canis Hispaniolanus." Imported dogs enacted a declara- 

 tion of independence several centuries before the revolt of the 

 Haytian slaves, and their descendants have become as thoroughly 

 West Indian as the Franks have become French. A continued process 

 of elimination has made the survivors climate-proof and self-support- 

 ing, and above all they have ceased to vary; Nature has accepted their 

 modified type as wholly adapted to the exigencies of their present 

 habitat. And if it is true that all runaway animals revert in some de- 

 gree to the characteristics of their primeval relatives, the ancestor of 

 the domestic dog would appear to have been a bush-tailed, brindle- 

 skinned, and black-muzzled brute, intermittently gregarious, and 

 combining the burrowing propensity of the fox with the co-operative 

 hunting penchant of the wolf. 



Fourteen years of bushwhacker warfare have almost wholly ex- 

 terminated the half -wild cattle of the Cuban sierras, but the bush dog 

 has come to stay. The yelping of its whelps can be heard in thou- 

 sands of jungle woods and mountain ravines, both of Cuba and 

 Hayti, and no variety of thoroughbreds will venture to follow 



