AUSTRALIAN SHEPHERDS 



strangers to perform the ordinary duties of civil life — to eat, 

 to drink, and even to sleep — without dismounting from their 

 steeds." Red Indians of Pampas and Prairie, cowboy and 

 gaucho, lived exactly in the same way. 



In those pages of Gibbon which treat of the Huns, Scy- 

 thians, and other hordes, one recognizes sometimes the 

 wagon of the Boers ; sometimes a migration of the East 

 African Masai; then perhaps it is a weapon that is really 

 the lasso, or a disposition and character exactly paralleled by 

 the Crows and Blackfeet. Even the great grass plains of 

 Australia, where the kangaroo, the wallaby, and the dingo 

 have been replaced by the sheep and the "Waler" horse, 

 one finds, in the shepherd and squatter, traits that remind 

 one of the gaucho or the cowboy. 



Nor is this in the least extraordinary, for when a scanty 

 rainfall produces those great limitless rolling seas of grass, 

 Nature provides first large herbivorous animals to eat it 

 down as well as carnivorous beasts to keep their numbers in 

 control, until such time as a race of horsemen appears, 

 whose domestic cattle replace the bisons, guanacos, kan- 

 garoos, and antelopes, and so assist in replenishing and 

 subduing the earth. 



225 



