THE START 27 



the strange representatives of the giant South American 

 pleistocene fauna had lasted down to within a compara- 

 tively few thousand years, down to the time when man, 

 substantially as the Spaniards found him, flourished on 

 the continent. Incidentally the discovery tended to show 

 that this fauna had lasted much later in South America 

 than was the case with the corresponding faunas in other 

 parts of the world; and therefore it tended to disprove the 

 claims advanced by Doctor Ameghino for the extreme age, 

 geologically, of this fauna, and for the extreme antiquity 

 of man on the American continent. 



One day Doctor Moreno handed me a copy of The 

 Outlook containing my account of a cougar-hunt in Ari- 

 zona, saying that he noticed that I had very little faith 

 in cougars attacking men, although I had explicitly stated 

 that such attacks sometimes occurred. I told him, Yes, 

 that I had found that the cougar was practically harmless 

 to man, the undoubtedly authentic instances of attacks on 

 men being so exceptional that they could in practice be 

 wholly disregarded. Thereupon Doctor Moreno showed 

 me a scar on his face, and told me that he had himself been 

 attacked and badly mauled by a puma which was undoubt- 

 edly trying to prey on him; that is, which had started on 

 a career as a man-eater. This was to me most interesting. 

 I had often met men who knew other men who had seen 

 other men who said that they had been attacked by pumas, 

 but this was the first time that I had ever come across a 

 man who had himself been attacked. Doctor Moreno, as 

 I have said, is not only an eminent citizen, but an eminent 

 scientific man, and his account of what occurred is unques- 

 tionably a scientifically accurate statement of the facts. 



