The Start 27 



of the jaguar, and of the cougar, or puma, which are 

 worth recording. The facts about the jaguar are not 

 new in the sense of casting new Hght on its character, 

 although they are interesting; but the facts about the 

 behavior of the puma in one district of Patagonia are 

 of great interest, because they give an entirely new side 

 of its life-history. 



There was travelling with me at the time Doctor 

 Francisco P. Moreno, of Buenos Aires. Doctor Mo- 

 reno is at the present day a member of the National 

 Board of Education of the Argentine, a man who has 

 worked in every way for the benefit of his country, per- 

 haps especially for the benefit of the children, so that 

 when he was first introduced to me it was as the "Jacob 

 Riis of the Argentine" — for they know my deep and 

 affectionate intimacy with Jacob Riis. He is also an 

 eminent man of science, who has done admirable work 

 as a geologist and a geographer. At one period, in con- 

 nection with his duties as a boundary commissioner on 

 the survey between Chile and the Argentine, he worked 

 for years in Patagonia. It was he who made the ex- 

 traordinary discovery in a Patagonian cave of the still 

 fresh fragments of skin and other remains of the my- 

 lodon, the aberrant horse known as the onohipidium, 

 the huge South American tiger, and the macrauchenia, 

 all of them extinct animals. This discovery showed 

 that some of the strange representatives of the giant 

 South American pleistocene fauna had lasted down to 

 within a comparatively few thousand years, down to the 

 time when man, substantially as the Spaniards found 

 him, flourished on the continent. Incidentally the dis- 



