206 PATAGONIAN EXPEDITIONS : NARRATIVE. 



'Beagle,' there is a passage which, for me, has a very special interest 

 and significance. It is as follows, and the italicization is mine : ' In 

 calling up images of the past, I find the plains of Patagonia frequently 

 cross before my eyes ; yet these plains are pronounced by all to be most 

 wretched and useless. They are characterized by only negative pos- 

 sessions ; without habitations, without water, without trees, without 

 mountains; they support only a few dwarfed plants. Why, then — and 

 the case is not peculiar to myself — Jiavc these arid wastes taken so firm 

 possession of my mind? Why have not the still more level, the greener, 

 and more fertile pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an 

 equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings, but it must be 

 partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The plains of 

 Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely practicable and hence 

 unknown ; they bear the stamp of having thus lasted for ages, and there 

 appears no limit to their duration through future time. If, as the 

 ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable 

 breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who 

 would not look at these last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep, 

 but ill-defined sensations?' 



"That he did not in this passage hit on the right explanation of the 

 sensations he experienced in Patagonia and of the strength of the impres- 

 sions it made on his mind, I am quite convinced ; for the thing is just as 

 true to-day as of the time, in 1836, when he wTOte that the case was not 

 peculiar to himself Yet since that date — which now, thanks to Darwin, 

 seems so remote to the naturalist — those desolate regions have ceased to 

 be impracticable, and, although still uninhabited and uninhabitable, except 

 to a few nomads, they are no longer unknown." And on page 222, after 

 a very graphic description of how, under certain circumstances, the mind 

 of the individual living under the constant restraint of highly civilized 

 conditions suddenly, through a momentary taste of adventure, lapses into 

 a more natural and less artificial condition; he adds: "It was elation of 

 this kind, the feeling experienced on going back to a mental condition we 

 have outgrown, which I had in Patagonian solitudes ; for I had undoubt- 

 edly ^c//^ back ; and that state of intense watchfulness, or alertness rather, 

 with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental 

 state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer 

 guide in his instinct ; he is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly 



