GREAT lURD GATHERINGS 35 



compiling his Royal Natural History. He liad also 

 read Darwin and other naturahsts who have described 

 that same region, and had a liundred tilings to look at 

 besides the fossils. One thing he desired to see was 

 the crested screamer — that great spur-winged loud- 

 voiced bird which has puzzled zoologists to classify, 

 some thinking it ralline, others anserine, in its affinities, 

 while Huxley considered it w\as related to the archae- 

 opteryx. Having established himself on the back of a 

 horse, Mr. Lydckker — a biological Dr. Syntax of the 

 twentieth century — set out in quest of this singular fowl, 

 and eventually in some wild and lonely spot succeeded 

 in catching sight at a vast distance of a specimen or 

 two. This did not satisfy him ; he wanted to see the 

 great birds as I had seen them, when I rode among 

 them across a vast marshy plain and saw them in pairs 

 and parties, and in bunches of a score or two to a hun- 

 dred, like an innumerable widely scattered flock of graz- 

 ing sheep spread out and extending on every side to the 

 horizon. And he wanted to hear them as I had heard 

 them, "counting the hours," as the gauchos say, when 

 at intervals during the night they all burst out singing 

 like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the 

 incalculable multitude produce an effect as of thousands 

 and tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the 

 listener is shaken by the tempest of sound and the earth 

 itself appears to tremble beneath him. 



All this, our naturalist was informed by persons on 

 the spot, was pure romance; no such vast congregations 

 of crested screamers were ever seen, and no such great 



