1836.] RETROSPECT. #7 



prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the 

 God of Nature : no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not 

 feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. In 

 calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia fre- 

 quently cross before my eyes ; yet these plains are pronounced by all 

 wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative 

 characters ; without habitations, without water, without trees, without 

 mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and 

 the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm 

 a hold on my memory ? Why have not the still more level, the greener 

 and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced 

 an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings; but it 

 must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The 

 plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely passable, and 

 hence unknown ; they bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, 

 for ages, and there appears no limit to their duration through future 

 time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an 

 impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable 

 excess, who would not look at these last boundaries to man's know- 

 ledge with deep but ill-defined sensations ? 



Lastly, of natural scenery, the views from lofty mountains, though 

 certainly in one sense not beautiful, are very memorable. When looking 

 down from the highest crest of the Cordillera, the mind, undisturbed 

 by minute details, was filled with the stupendous dimensions of the 

 surrounding masses. 



Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create 

 astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian, 

 of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back 

 over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been 

 men like these? men, whose very signs and expressions are less 

 intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals ; men, who do 

 not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of 

 human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not 

 believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage 

 and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame 

 animal ; and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same 

 which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the 

 tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over 

 the wild plains of Africa. 



Among the other most remarkable spectacles which we have beheld, 

 may be ranked the Southern Cross, the cloud of Magellan, and the 

 other constellations of the southern hemisphere the water-spout the 

 glacier leading its blue stream of ice, overhanging the sea in a bold 

 precipice a lagoon-island raised by the reef-building corals an active 

 volcano and the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake. These 

 latter phenomena, perhaps, possess for me a peculiar interest, from 

 their intimate connection with the geological structure of the world. 

 The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive 

 event ; the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of 



