ao4 
The seal, somewhat conventionalized by Van Brussel, and passing under 
the guise of ‘‘sea-lion’’ (1799) 
as of equine shape.! It is interesting to 
note that the figure of a horse is intro- 
duced by Sebastian Cabot in the Argen- 
tine region of his world-map of 1544, but 
this can scarcely be construed as evidence 
that native wild horses were seen by that 
navigator anywhere in South America. 
This view is, however, maintained by 
Senior Anibal Cardoso in a recent memoir 
in the Anales of the Buenos Aires Mu- 
seum (vol. xv, 1912) on the origin of 
Argentine horses. 
In regard to the elephant-seal, Dr. 
R. Lydekker is authority for the state- 
ment that our first definite, if not actual, 
_knowledge of this animal seems to have 
been derived from a specimen brought to 
England by Lord Anson in 1744 from the 
island of Juan Fernandez; and also 
from the figure and account given in 
the Voyage Round the World of that 
great commander, where the species 
is called “sea-lyon.” It is, however, 
certain that Dampier in 1684, and Peter 
Kolben in 1705, also described the same 
creature (Macrorhynchus leoninus U.). 
The former writes: 
1 The most recent notices of this large mammal, 
Hippocamelus bisulcus, are those by J. A. Allen, in 
the Report of the Princeton Patagonian Expedi- 
tion (1906), and M. Neveu-Lamaire and G. 
Grandidier, in Les mammiféres des hauts plateaux 
de l’ Amérique du Sud (1911). Lydekker gives 
a colored plate of the guemul in Proc. Zool. Soc. 
London, 1899. 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
The Sea Lion is 
a large Creature 
about 12 or 14 foot 
long. The biggest 
part of the Body is 
as big as a Bull: It 
is shaped like a Seal, 
but 6 times as big. 
The Head is like a 
Lion’s Head; _ it 
hath a broad Face 
with many long 
Hairs growing a- 
bout its Lips like a 
Cat. It hasa great 
goggle Eye, the 
Teeth 3 Inches long, about the bigness of a 
Man’s Thumb....They have no Hair on 
their Bodies like the Seal; they are of a dun 
colour, and are all extraordinary fat.’”’— 
Voyages, cap. iv. , 
Very important for the west coast of 
South America is Cieza de Leon’s 
Cronica del Perw (1553). The Amster- 
dam edition of this work (1554) contains 
a fair illustration of the llama, an animal 
of the existence of which Europeans first 
became aware as early as 1513, through 
Balboa’s intercourse with the Aztec 
chieftain Tumaco. Members of the 
llama race, of edentates, and many 
of the more characteristic Central and 
South American birds, mammals and 
even tropical vegetation, are represented 
with considerable fidelity in early six- 
teenth century cartography of the west- 
ke 
a he 
MU 
= ~ 
Not a griffin, but a harmless spotted dog, rep- 
resented in pre-Columbian Maya codices 
