28 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
avail him. Hemay scorn the horse and his rider, 
what time he lifts himself up, but the cowardly 
murderous methods of science, and a systematic 
war of extermination, have left him no chance. 
And with the rhea go the flamingo, antique and 
splendid ; and the swans in their bridal plumage ; 
and the rufous tinamou—sweet and mournful melo- 
dist of the eventide ; and the noble crested screamer, 
that clarion-voiced watch-bird of the nigat in the 
wilderness. These, and the other large avians, to- 
gether with the finest of the mammalans, will 
shortly be lost to the pampas utterly as the great 
bustard is to England, and as the wild turkey and 
bison and many other species will shortly be lost to 
North America. What a wail there would be in the 
world if a sudden destruction were to fall on the 
accumulated art-treasures of the National Gallery, 
and the marbles in the British Museum, and the 
contents of the King’s Library—the old prints and 
‘medieval illuminations! And these are only the 
work of human hands and brains-—impressions of 
individual genius on perishable material, immortal 
only in the sense that the silken cocoon of the dead 
moth is so, because they continue to exist and shine 
when the artist’s hands and brain are dust :—and 
man has the long day of life before him in which to 
do again things like these, and better than these, if 
there is any truth in evolution. But the forms of 
life in the two higher vertebrate classes are Nature’s 
most perfect work; and the life of even a single 
species is of incalculably greater value to mankind, 
for what it teaches and would continue to teach, 
than all the chiselled marbles and painted canvases 
