16 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
hunts in companies ; and when these long-bodied 
creatures sit up erect, glaring with beady eyes, 
grinning and chattering at the passer-by, they look 
like little friars in black robes and grey cowls; but 
the expression on their round faces is malignant 
and bloodthirsty beyond anything in nature, and 
it would perhaps be more decent to liken them to 
devils rather than to humans. 
On the pampas there is, strictly speaking, only 
one ruminant, the Cervus campestris, which is 
common. The most curious thing about this animal 
is that the male emits a rank, musky odour, so 
powerful that when the wind blows from it the 
effluvium comes in nauseating gusts to the nostrils 
from a distance exceeding two miles. It is really 
astonishing that only one small ruminant should be 
found on this immense grassy area, so admirably 
suited to herbivorous quadrupeds, a portion of which 
at the present moment affords sufficient pasture to 
eighty millions of sheep, cattle, and horses. In La 
Plata the author of The Mammoth and the Flood will 
find few to quarrel with his doctrine. 
Of Edentates there are four. The giant armadillo 
does not range so far, and the delicate little pink 
fairy armadillo, the truncated Chlamydophorus, is 
a dweller in the sand-dunes of Mendoza, and has 
never colonized the grassy pampas. The Tatusia 
hybrida, called ‘little mule” from the length of its 
ears, and the Dasypus tricinctus, which, when dis- 
turbed, rolls itself into a ball, the wedge-shaped head 
and wedge-shaped tail admirably fitting into the 
deep-cut shell side by side; and the quirquincho 
(Dasypus minutus), all inhabit the pampa, are 
