STEPPES AND DESERTS. ] 3 



and perhaps thousands of years may elapse before the 

 moveable sand can afford to the roots of plants a secure 

 holding place. 



These considerations are sufficient to explain why, with 

 an external 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 surround- 

 ing 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 wilder- 

 ness ; 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 ( 26 ) was almost un- 

 known to the original inhabitants of the New Continent. 

 Hardly any of the American tribes have ever availed them- 

 selves 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 the intermediate 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 



