2 The Naturalist in La Plata, 



that grace and spirit which freedom and ^pildness 

 give. In numbers they are many — twenty-five 

 millions of sheep in this district, fifty millions in 

 that, a hundred millions in a third — but how few 

 are the species in place of those destroyed ? and 

 when the owner of many sheep and much wheat 

 desires variety — for he possesses this instinctive 

 desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by 

 the perverted instinct of destruction — what is there 

 left to him, beyond his very own, except the weeds 

 that spring up in his fields under all skies, ringing 

 him round with old-world monotonous forms, as 

 tenacious of their undesired union with him as the 

 rats and cockroaches that inhabit his house? 



We hear most frequently of North America, New 

 Zealand, and Australia in this connection ; but 

 nowhere on the globe has civilization "written 

 strange defeatures " more markedly than on that 

 great area of level country called by English writers 

 i]ie pampas, but by the Spanish more appropriately 

 La Pampa — from the Quichua word signifying open 

 space or country — since it forms in most part one 

 continuous plain, extending on its eastern border 

 from the river Parana, in latitude 32°, to the Pata- 

 gonian formation on the river Colorado, and com- 

 prising about two hundred thousand square miles of 

 humid, grassy country. 



This district has been colonized by Europeans 

 since the middle of the sixteenth century; but 

 down to within a very few years ago immigration 

 was on too limited a scale to make any very great 

 change; and, speaking only of the pampean 

 country, the conquered territory was a long, thinly- 



