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, 
