182 _  Ldle Days in Patagonia. 
perpetuate unfitness, and in the interest of suffering 
individuals inflicts a lasting injury on the race. It 
is a beautiful and sacred thing to minister to the 
blind, and to lead them, but a horrible thing to 
encourage them to marry and transmit the miserable 
defective condition to their posterity. Yet this is 
very common; and not long ago a leader-writer in 
one of the principal London journals spoke of this 
very thing in terms of rapturous approval, and 
looked forward to the growth of a totally blind 
race of men among us, as though it were something. 
to be proud of—a triumph of our civilization ! 
Pelleschi, in his admirable book on the Chaco 
Indians, says that malformations are never seen in 
these savages, that physically they are all perfect 
men; and he remarks that in their exceedingly 
hard struggle for existence in a thorny wilderness, 
beset with perils, any bodily defect or ailment 
would be fatal. And as the eye in their life is the 
most important organ, it must be an eye without 
flaw. In this circumstance only do savages differ 
from us—namely, in the absence or rarity of de- 
fective eyes among them; and when those who, 
like Dr. Brudenell Carter, believe in the decadence 
of the eye in civilized man quote Humboldt’s words 
about the miraculous sight of South American 
savages, they quote an error. It is not strange 
that Humboldt should have fallen into it, for, after 
all, he had only the means which we all possess of 
finding out things—a limited sight and a fallible 
mind. Like the savage, he had trained his faculties 
