CHAP. Ill] BIG GUNS IN SOUTH AMERICA 67 



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, masto- 

 dons, horses of many kinds, camel-like pachyderms, 

 giant ground-sloths, mylodons the size of the rhinoceros, 

 and many, many other strange and wonderful creatures. 

 P'rom some cause, concerning the nature of which we 

 cannot at present even hazard a guess, this vast and 

 giant fauna vanished completely, the tremendous catas- 

 trophe (the duration of which is unknown) not being 

 consummated until within a few thousand or a few 

 score thousand years. When the white man reached 

 South America, he found the same weak and impover- 

 ished mammalian fauna that exists practically unchanged 

 to-day. Elsewhere civilized man has been even more 

 destructive than his very destructive uncivilized 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 Africa ; and in 

 our own day he has repeated the feat, on a very large 

 scale, in the rest of Africa and in North America. But 

 in South America, although he is in places responsible 

 for the wanton slaughter of the most interesting and 

 the largest, or the most beautiful, birds, his advent has 

 meant a positive enrichment of the wild mammalian 

 fauna. None of the native grass-eating mammals, the 

 graminivores, approach in size and beauty the herds of 

 wild or half-wild cattle and horses, or so add to the 

 interest of the landscape. There is every reason why 

 the good people of South America should waken, as we 

 of North America, very late in the day, are beginning 

 to waken, and as the peoples of northern Europe — not 

 southern Europe — have already partially wakened, to 

 the duty of preserving from impoverishment and ex- 



