84 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



are the worst enemies of foals. It was interesting to find 

 that my hosts, and the mixed-blood hunters and ranch 

 workers, combined special knowledge of many of the hab- 

 its of these big cats with a curious ignorance of other 

 matters concerning them and a readiness to believe fables 

 about them. This was precisely what I had found to be 

 the case with the old-time North American hunters in dis- 

 cussing the puma, bear, and wolf, and with the English 

 and Boer hunters of Africa when they spoke of the lion 

 and rhinoceros. Until the habit of scientific accuracy in 

 observation and record is achieved and until specimens 

 are preserved and carefully compared, entirely truthful 

 men, at home in the wilderness, will whole-heartedly accept, 

 and repeat as matters of gospel faith, theories which split 

 the grizzly and black bears of each locality in the United 

 States, and the lions and black rhinos of South Africa, 

 or the jaguars and pumas of any portion of South America, 

 into several different species, all with widely different 

 habits. They will, moreover, describe these imaginary 

 habits with such sincerity and minuteness that they de- 

 ceive most listeners; and the result sometimes is that an 

 otherwise good naturalist will perpetuate these fables, as 

 Hudson did when he wrote of the puma. Hudson was a 

 capital observer and writer when he dealt with the ordi- 

 nary birds and mammals of the well-settled districts near 

 Buenos Aires and at the mouth of the Rio Negro; but he 

 knew nothing of the wilderness. This is no reflection on 

 him; his books are great favorites of mine, and are to a 

 large degree models of what such books should be; I only 

 wish that there were hundreds of such writers and observers 

 who would give us similar books for all parts of America. 



