202 PATAGONIAN EXPEDITIONS : NARRATIVE. 



literally ripping her bottom out, through more than half her length. 

 Luckily she held fast to the reef, and since the weather was calm, no 

 difficulty was experienced in disembarking the passengers and crew, and 

 thus preventing any loss of life. 



We arrived in Buenos Aires on the fifth of June. I remained in the 

 city for a few days, renewing old acquaintances and forming new ones, 

 after which I started on an extended trip up the river, going as far as 

 Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, passing and stopping at many interest- 

 ing places on the way. The River Paraguay above its confluence with 

 the Parana is still a noble stream, as it flows quietly along through broad 

 savannahs or stretches of forest land, with banks elevated usually but a 

 few feet above the water's level, as shown in Fig. 32. 



At Entre Rios we stopped for a number of hours and, together with two 

 of my fellow passengers, I took a drive through the city and visited an 

 old monastery, where I was much interested in a considerable collection 

 of fossils and other objects of natural history, which had evidently been 

 picked up and brought together solely through a spirit of curiosity. Most 

 of these bore no labels setting forth even so much as the locality from 

 which they had been obtained. I was chiefly interested in the remains 

 of some fossil saurians which, from the nature of the matrix in which they 

 were imbedded and from the character of the bones themselves, I judged 

 to have come from Triassic deposits. The sole attendant at that time 

 present in the institution seemed as ignorant as myself regarding their 

 history, as indeed he was of the other palseontological and zoological 

 materials in the collection. His chief interest seemed to lie in a collection 

 of the hearts of dead saints, or other worthies, preserved in alcohol and dis- 

 played in glass jars. These were fully labelled, and the attendant seemed 

 at a loss to understand our total indifference to such objects, as he waxed 

 eloquent in an attempt to set forth to us the principal features in the life 

 history of each of the former owners of these now bleached and gruesome 

 objects. What morbid interest or curiosity could prompt the friends of 

 the departed to retain such repulsive souvenirs of their favorite dead is, 

 I confess, quite beyond my understanding. Nevertheless the custom 

 seemed to be not an unusual one in Catholic America, for I remembered 

 that while visiting the church at the Recoleta both in Buenos Aires and 

 Montevideo, we were shown similar portions of the anatomy of other 

 favorite saints, preserved in spirits and placed on exhibition in the sacristy. 



