DARWIN. 37 



England was a large town in London ! " " Washing my 

 face in the morning caused much speculation at the 

 village of Las Minas ; a superior tradesman closely 

 cross-questioned me about so singular a practice." 

 Among these rich descendants of Europeans Darwin felt 

 as if he were among the inhabitants of Central Africa ; 

 so low can the proud superior race descend, that the 

 distance between it and the negro appeared small indeed. 

 The remarkable absence of trees in the country could 

 not fail to provoke comment; but it is on the old- 

 fashioned basis, and the young student does not get 

 beyond the conclusion " that herbaceous plants, instead 

 of trees, were created to occupy that wide area, which, 

 within a period not very remote, has been raised above 

 the waters of the sea. 1 ' This appears in the first edition ; 

 but in 1845 these words were expunged, and the author 

 says significantly "we must look to some other and 

 unknown cause." 



At Maldonado within the distance of a morning's 

 walk no fewer than eighty species of birds were collected, 

 most of them exceedingly beautiful. Darwin's observa- 

 tions on the molothri (representatives of our cuckoos), 

 the tyrant fly-catchers, and the carrion-feeding hawks are 

 most attractive reading. Rio Negro, much further 

 south, was next visited, and the fauna of a salt lake 

 examined. The adaptation of creatures to live in and 

 near brine struck him as wonderful. "Well may we 

 affirm," says he, " that every part of the world is 

 habitable ! Whether lakes of brine, or those subterranean 

 ones, hidden beneath volcanic mountains warm mineral 

 springs the wide expanse and depths of the ocean the 



