STEPPES AND DESERTS. 33 



of Newfoundland and to the shores of the Old Continent, and causes 

 West India cocoa-nuts and other tropical fruits to reach the coast of 

 Ireland and Norway. There is still at least at the present time, an 

 arm of this current directed from the Azores to the south-east, which 

 sometimes produces disasters by carrying ships upon the west coast 

 of Africa, which it strikes at a part lined by sand-hills. Other sea 

 coasts (I particularly recall that of Peru between Amotape and Co- 

 quimbo) show that, in these hot regions of the earth, where rain 

 never falls and where neither Lecideas nor other Lichens ( 25 ) ger- 

 minate, centuries and perhaps thousands of years may elapse before 

 the movable sand can afford to the roots of plants a secure holding 

 place. 



These considerations are sufficient to explain why, with an ex- . 

 ternal similarity of form, Africa and South America present so / 

 marked a difference of character both in respect to climate and to< 

 vegetation. But although the South American Steppe is covered : 

 with a thin coating of mould or fertile earth, and although it is 

 periodically bathed by rains, and becomes covered at such seasons 

 with luxuriantly sprouting herbage, yet it never could attract the 

 surrounding nations or tribes to forsake the beautiful mountain 

 valleys of Caraccas, the margin of the sea, or the wooded banks of 

 the Orinoco, for the treeless and springless wilderness ; and thus, 

 previous to the arrival of .European and African settlers, the Steppe 

 was almost entirely devoid of human inhabitants. 



The Llanos are, indeed, well suited to the rearing of cattle, but 

 the care of animals yielding milk ( 3S ) was almost unknown to the 

 original inhabitants of the New Continent. Hardly any of the 

 American tribes have ever availed themselves of the advantages 

 which nature offered them in this respect. The American race 

 (which, with the exception of the Esquimaux, is one and the same 

 from 65 north to 55 south latitude), has not passed from the 

 state of hunters to that of cultivators of the soil through th$ inter- 

 mediate stage of a pastoral life. Two kinds of native cattle (the 

 Buffalo and the Musk Ox) feed in the northern prairies of western 

 Canada and the plains of arctic America, in Quivira, and around 

 the colossal ruins of the Aztec fortress which rises in the wilderness, 

 like an American Palmyra, on the solitary banks of the Gila, The 



