A Jaguar-Hunt on the Taquary "jy 



duce offspring which will breed with either parent stock; 

 and tame dogs in difJerent quarters of the world, al- 

 though all of them fertile inter se, are in many cases 

 obviously blood kin to the neighboring wild, wolf-like 

 or jackal-like creatures which are specifically, and pos- 

 sibly even generically, distinct from one another. The 

 big red wolf of the South American plains is not closely 

 related to the northern wolves; and it was to me unex- 

 pected to find it interbreeding with ordinary domestic 

 dogs. 



In the evenings after dinner we sat in the bare ranch 

 dining-room, or out under the trees in the hot darkness, 

 and talked of many things: natural history with the 

 naturalists, and all kinds of other subjects both with 

 them and with our Brazilian friends. Colonel Rondon 

 is not simply "an officer and a gentleman" in the sense 

 that is honorably true of the best army officers in every 

 good military service. He is also a peculiarly hardy and 

 competent explorer, a good field naturalist and scientific 

 man, a student and a philosopher. With him the con- 

 versation ranged from jaguar-hunting and the perils of 

 exploration in the "matto grosso," the great wilderness, 

 to Indian anthropology, to the dangers of a purely ma- 

 terialistic industrial civilization, and to Positivist moral- 

 ity. The colonel's Positivism was in very fact to him a 

 religion of humanity, a creed which bade him be just and 

 kindly and useful to his fellow men, to live his life 

 bravely, and no less bravely to face death, without refer- 

 ence to what he believed, or did not believe, or to what 

 the unknown hereafter might hold for him. 



The native hunters who accompanied us were swarthy 



