1833.] FOSSIL BONES. 133 



Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely anything 

 which travellers have written about its extreme flatness, 

 can be considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find 

 a spot where, by slowly turning round, objects were not 

 seen at greater distances in some directions than in others ; 

 and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, 

 a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water, 

 his horizon is two miles and four-fifths distant. In like 

 manner, the more level the plain, the more nearly does the 

 horizon approach within these narrow limits ; and this, in 

 my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which one would 

 have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed. 



October 1st. — We started by moonlight, and arrived at 

 the Rio Tercero by sunrise. This river is also called the 

 Saladillo, and it deserves the name, for the water is brackish. 

 I stayed here the greater part of the day, searching for 

 fossil bones. Besides a perfect tooth of the toxodon, and 

 many scattered bones, I found two immense skeletons near 

 each other, projecting in bold relief from the perpendicular 

 cliff of the Parana. They were, however, so completely 

 decayed, that I could only bring away small fragments of 

 one of the great molar teeth ; but these are sufficient to 

 show that the remains belonged to a mastodon, probably 

 to the same species with that which formerly must have 

 inhabited the Cordillera in Upper Peru in such great 

 numbers. The men who took me in the canoe, said they 

 had long known of these skeletons, and had often wondered 

 how they had got there : the necessity of a theory being 

 felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha, 

 the mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal ! In the 

 evening we rode another stage, and crossed the Monge, 

 another brackish stream, bearing the dregs of the washings 

 of the Pampas. 



October 2nd. — We passed through Corunda, which, from 

 the luxuriance of its gardens, was one of the prettiest 

 villages I saw. From this point to St. F6 the road is not 

 very safe. The western side of the Parana northward 

 ceases to be inhabited ; and hence the Indians sometimes 

 come down thus far, and waylay travellers. The nature 

 of the country also favours this, for instead of a grassy 

 plain, there is an open woodland, composed of low prickly 

 mimosas. We passed some houses that had been ransacked 

 and since deserted ; we saw also a spectacle, which my 

 guides viewed with high satisfaction ; it was the skeleton 



