named and thus avoid a great duplication of terms, which was already 

 bad enough. Among the Santa Cruz animals there is one unfortunate 

 creature to which no less than twenty-seven different names have been 

 given. Of this list only one can be used, the name originally given by 

 Owen to a specimen brought home by Charles Darwin, Nesodon 

 imbricatus. 



What made Ameghino's work on the Santa Cruz fossils so especially 

 valuable to me was its pioneer character, which relieved me of an im- 

 mense amount of drudgery. Until he began his work on it, very Httle 

 of the Santa Cruz fauna was known, though it was discovered by 

 Darwin, and the few scraps that had been brought back by collectors 

 had, very generally, been misinterpreted by their describers. He thus 

 entered a new and unknown world of extremely rich and varied mam- 

 maUan life, totally different from the contemporaneous mammals of the 

 Northern Hemisphere. He not only described and named a host of new 

 species and genera, but he marshalled them in orderly array, referring 

 them to their proper families and orders. I soon learned to trust his 

 judgement and accept his results, sometimes following him too un- 

 critically into errors. Argentina does well to be proud of his memory, 

 for he was a "native son," though of Italian descent. 



I was now toiling almost as hard as I had done in Heidelberg the 

 year I took my degree there. When I considered the immense mass of 

 work that lay ahead of me, photographing, measuring, describing, 

 translating and writing, I felt like the hero in the fairy tale who was 

 condemned, on pain of death, to dig away a high hill, in a single night 

 and with a glass pickaxe and shovel. I did not fear being put to death, 

 but I sometimes felt desperate over the length of my exile from home; 

 it seemed impossible to accomplish my allotted task within any reason- 

 able time. However, Darwin's favourite motto, "it's dogged as does it," 

 carried me through it all. Naturally, I had little time for amusements 

 of any sort. Social life, in our sense of the word, hardly exists in the 

 Spanish-speaking countries and so the few private houses that I entered 

 were all, except Ameghino's, those of foreigners. 



An evening at the Deutscher Verein of Buenos Aires offered distrac- 

 tion of very different character. Lehmann-Nietsche introduced me and, 

 in spite of my inability to join in the beer-drinking, I was very hos- 

 pitably received. The address was made by a young German, who was 

 a surgeon in the Bolivian army. There had been a boundary dispute 

 between Bolivia and Brazil over a region known as Acre, which, after 

 long neglect, had suddenly sprung into importance as valuable rubber 



C 252 ;] 



