A JAGUAR-HUNT ON THE TAQUARY 69 



not even approach the similar mammaUan Ufe of North 

 America and northern Eurasia, poor though this is com- 

 pared with the seething vitahty of tropical Ufe in the Old 

 World. During a geologically recent period, a period ex- 

 tending into that which saw man spread over the world in 

 substantially the physical and cultural stage of many exist- 

 ing savages, South America possessed a varied and striking 

 fauna of enormous beasts — sabre-tooth tigers, huge lions, 

 mastodons, horses of many kinds, camel-like pachyderms, 

 giant ground-sloths, mylodons the size of the rhinoceros, 

 and many, many other strange and wonderful creatures. 

 From some cause, concerning the nature of which we can- 

 not at present even hazard a guess, this vast and giant fauna 

 vanished completely, the tremendous catastrophe (the dura- 

 tion of which is unknown) not being consummated until 

 within a few thousand or a few score thousand years. When 

 the white man reached South America he found the same 

 weak and impoverished mammalian fauna that exists 

 practically unchanged to-day. Elsewhere civilized man 

 has been even more destructive than his very destructive 

 uncivilized brothers of the magnificent mammalian life of 

 the wilderness; for ages he has been rooting out the higher 

 forms of beast life in Europe, Asia, and North Africa; 

 and in our own day he has repeated the feat, on a very 

 large scale, in the rest of Africa and in North America. 

 But in South America, although he is in places responsible 

 for the wanton slaughter of the most interesting and the 

 largest, or the most beautiful, birds, his advent has meant 

 a positive enrichment of the wild mammalian fauna. None 

 of the native grass-eating mammals, the graminivores, ap- 

 proach in size and beauty the herds of wild or half-wild 



