A JAGUAR-HUNT ON THE TAQUARY 75 



and with our Brazilian friends. Colonel Rondon is not 

 simply "an officer and a gentleman" in the sense that is 

 honorably true of the best army officers in every good 

 military service. He is also a peculiarly hardy and com- 

 petent explorer, a good field naturalist and scientific man, 

 a student and a philosopher. With him the conversation 

 ranged from jaguar-hunting and the perils of exploration 

 in the "matto grosso," the great wilderness, to Indian 

 anthropology, to the dangers of a purely materialistic in- 

 dustrial civilization, and to Positivist morality. The colo- 

 nel's Positivism was in very fact to him a religion of hu- 

 manity, a creed which bade him be just and kindly and 

 useful to his fellow men, to live his life bravely, and no 

 less bravely to face death, without reference to what he 

 believed, or did not believe, or to what the unknown here- 

 after might hold for him. 



The native hunters who accompanied us were swarthy 

 men of mixed blood. They were barefooted and scantily 

 clad, and each carried a long, clumsy spear and a keen 

 machete, in the use of which he was an expert. Now and 

 then, in thick jungle, we had to cut out a path, and it 

 was interesting to see one of them, although cumbered 

 by his unwieldy spear, handling his half-broken little horse 

 with complete ease while he hacked at limbs and branches. 

 Of the two ordinarily with us one was much the younger; 

 and whenever we came to an unusually doubtful-looking 

 ford or piece of boggy ground the elder man always sent 

 the younger one on and sat on the bank until he saw what 

 befell the experimenter. In that rather preposterous book 

 of our youth, the "Swiss Family Robinson," mention is 

 made of a tame monkey called Nips, which was used to 



