142 THE SCISSOR BEAK. [chap. 



the puma, for on the bare hard soil of Patagonia I have 

 frequently seen scores so deep that no other animal could 

 have made them. The object of this practice is, I believe, 

 to tear off the ragged points of their claws, and not, as the 

 Gauchos think, to sharpen them. The jaguar is killed, 

 without much difficulty, by the aid of dogs baying and 

 driving him up a tree, where he is despatched with bullets. 



Owing to bad weather we remained two days at our 

 moorings. Our only amusement was catching fish for our 

 dinner; there were several kinds and all good eating. A 

 fish called the * ' armado " (a Silurus) is remarkable from a 

 harsh grating noise which it makes when caught by hook 

 and line, and which can be distinctly heard when the fish 

 is beneath the water. This same fish has the power of 

 firmly catching hold of any object, such as the blade 

 of an oar or the fishing-line, with the strong spine both of 

 its pectoral and dorsal fin. In the evening the weather 

 was quite tropical, the thermometer standing at 79°. 

 Numbers of fireflies were hovering about, and the 

 musquitoes were very troublesome. I exposed my hand 

 for five minutes, and it was soon black with them ; I do 

 not suppose there could have been less than fifty, all busy 

 sucking. 



October iK^th. — We got under way and passed Punta 

 Gorda, where there is a colony of tame Indians from the 

 province of Missiones. We sailed rapidly down the current, 

 but before sunset, from a silly fear of bad weather, we 

 brought-to in a narrow arm of the river. I took the boat 

 and rowed some distance up this creek. It was very 

 narrow, winding, and deep ; on each side a wall thirty 

 or forty feet high, formed by trees intwined with creepers, 

 gave to the canal a singularly gloomy appearance. I here 

 saw a very extraordinary bird, called the Scissor-beak 

 {Rhynchops nigra). It has short legs, web feet, extremely 

 long-pointed wings, and is of about the size of a tern. The 

 beak is flattened literally, that is, in a plane at right angles 

 to that of a spoon-bill or duck. It is as flat and elastic as 

 an ivory paper-cutter, and the lower mandible, differently 

 from every other bird, is an inch and a half longer than the 

 upper. In a lake near Maldonado, from which the water 

 had been nearly drained, and which, in consequence, 

 swarmed with small fry, I saw several of these birds, 

 generally in small flocks, flying rapidly backwards and 

 forwards close to the surface of the lake. They kept their 



