40 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



and almost as well-rounded as an ordinary lead 

 pencil. 



When on this quest I sometimes attempted to 

 picture to myself something of the outer and inner 

 life of the long- vanished inhabitants. The red 

 men of to-day may be of the same race and blood, 

 the lineal descendants of the workers in stone in 

 Patagonia ; but they are without doubt so changed, 

 and have lost so much, that their progenitors would 

 not know them, nor acknowledge them as relations. 

 Here, as in North America, contact with a superior 

 race has debased them and ensured their de- 

 struction. Some of their wild blood will continue 

 to flow in the veins of those who have taken their 

 place ; but as a race they will be blotted out from 

 earth, as utterly extinct in a few decades as the 

 mound-makers of the Mississippi valley, and the 

 races that built the forest-grown cities of Yucutan 

 and Central America. The men of the past in the 

 Patagonian valley were alone with nature, makers 

 of their own weapons and self-sustaining, untouched 

 by any outside influence, and with no knowledge 

 of any world beyond their valley and the adjacent 

 uninhabited uplands. And yet, judging even from 

 that dim partial glimpse I had had of their vanished 

 life, in the weapons and fragments I had picked 

 up, it seemed evident that the mind was not wholly 

 dormant in them, and that they were slowly pro- 

 gressing to a higher condition. 



Beyond that fact I could not go : all efforts to 

 know more, or to imagine more, ended in failure, 



