168 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



him and he will be at fault ; or, even on his native 

 heath, set him before an unfamiliar or unexpected 

 object, and he will show no superiority over his 

 civilized brother. I have witnessed one instance 

 in which not one but five men were all in fault, and 

 made a wrong guess ; while the one person of our 

 party who guessed correctly, or saw better per- 

 haps, was a child of civilization and a reader of 

 books, and, what is perhaps even more, the de- 

 scendant of a long line of bookish men. This 

 amazed me at the moment, for until then my child- 

 like faith in the belief of Humboldt, and of the 

 world generally, on the subject had never been 

 disturbed. Now I see how this curious thing hap- 

 pened. The object was at such a distance that 

 to all of us alike it presented no definite form, but 

 was merely something dark, standing against a 

 hoary background of tall grass-plumes. Our 

 guides, principally regarding its size, at once 

 guessed it to be an animal which they no doubt 

 expected to find in that place namely, a wild 

 horse. The other, who did not have that training 

 of the eye and mind for distant objects in the 

 desert, which is like an instinct, and, like instinct, 

 is liable to mistakes, and who carefully studied its 

 appearance for himself, pronounced it to be a dark 

 bush. When we got near it turned out to be a 

 clump of tall bullrushes, growing in a place where 

 they had no business to grow, and burnt by 

 drought and frosts to so dark a brown that at a 

 distance they seemed quite black. 



