382 The Naturalist in La Plata. 



ho\y } 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 in 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 

 Palaeolithic 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- 



