382 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
how, in the name of Evolution, did he come by 
them, and by other physical peculiarities—the 
snarling habit and that high-pitched animal voice, 
for instance—which made him a being different 
from others—one separate and far apart? Was 
he, so admirably formed, so complete and well- 
balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an old- 
fashioned phrase—a sport, or spontaneous individual 
variation—an experiment for a new human type, 
imagined by Nature in some past period, incon- 
ceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too 
late, found time to carry out? Or rather was he 
like that little hairy maiden exhibited not long ago 
in London, a reproduction of the past, the mystery 
called reversion—a something in the life of a species 
like memory in the life of an individual, the memory 
which suddenly brings back to the old man’s mind 
the image of his childhood? For no dream-monster 
in human form ever appeared to me with so strange 
and terrible a face; and this was no dream but 
sober fact, for I saw and spoke with this man; 
and unless cold steel has given him his quietus, 
or his own horse has crushed him, or a mad bull 
gored him—all natural forms-of death m that wild 
land—he is probably still living and in the prime 
of life, and perhaps at this very moment drink- 
ing gin at some astonished traveller’s expense 
at that very bar where I met him. The old 
Paleolithic man, judging from the few remains we 
have of him, must have had an unspeakably savage 
and, to our way of thinking, repulsive and horrible 
aspect, with his villainous low receding forehead, 
broad nose, great projecting upper jaw, and retreat- 
