A Jaguar-Hunt on the Taquary 71 



size of the beasts. It possesses more mammals that are 

 unique and distinctive in type than does any other con- 

 tinent save Australia; and they are of higher and much 

 more varied types than in Australia. But there is noth- 

 ing approaching the majesty, beauty, and swarming mass 

 of the great mammalian life of Africa and, in a less 

 degree, of tropical Asia; indeed, it does not even ap- 

 proach the similar mammalian life of North America 

 and northern Eurasia, poor though this is compared 

 with the seething vitality of tropical life in the Old 

 World. During a geologically recent period, a period 

 extending into that which saw man spread over the world 

 in substantially the physical and cultural stage of many 

 existing 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 won- 

 derful creatures. From some cause, concerning the 

 nature of which we cannot at present even hazard a 

 guess, this vast and giant fauna vanished completely, the 

 tremendous catastrophe (the duration of which is un- 

 known) not being consummated until within a few thou- 

 sand or a few score thousand years. When the white 

 man reached South America he found the same weak 

 and impoverished mammalian fauna that exists practi- 

 cally unchanged to-day. Elsewhere civilized man has 

 been even more destructive than his very destructive un- 

 civilized 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 



