2 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
that grace and spirit which freedom and wildness 
give. In numbers they are many—twenty-five 
millions of sheep in this district, fifty millions in 
that, a hundred millions in a third—but how few 
are the species in place of those destroyed? and 
when the owner of many sheep and much wheat 
desires variety—for he possesses this instinctive 
desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by 
the perverted instinct of destruction—what is there 
left to him, beyond his very own, except the weeds 
that spring up in his fields under all skies, ringing 
him round with old-world monotonous forms, as 
tenacious of their undesired union with him as the 
rats and cockroaches that inhabit his house P 
We hear most frequently of North America, New 
Zealand, and Australia in this connection; but 
nowhere on the globe has civilization ‘“ written 
strange defeatures”’ more markedly than on that 
great area of level country called by English writers 
the pampas, but by the Spanish more appropriately 
La Pampa—trom the Quichua word signifying open 
space or country—since it forms in most part one 
continuous plain, extending on its eastern border 
from the river Parana, in latitude 32°, to the Pata- 
gonian formation on the river Colorado, and com- 
prising about two hundred thousand square miles of 
humid, grassy country. 
This district has been colonized by Europeans 
since the middle of the sixteenth century; but 
down to within a very few years ago immigration 
was on too limited a scale to make any very great 
change; and, speaking only of the pampean 
country, the conquered territory was a long, thinly- 
