2 The Naturalist in La Plata. 



that grace and spirit which freedom and wildness 

 give. In numbers they are many — twenty-five 

 millions of sheep in this district, fifty millions in 

 that, a hundred millions in a third — but how few 

 are the species in place of those destroyed ? and 

 when the owner of many sheep and much wheat 

 desires variety — for he possesses this instinctive 

 desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by 

 the perverted instinct of destruction — what is there 

 left to him, beyond his very own, except the weeds 

 that spring up in his fields under all skies, ringing 

 him round with old-world monotonous forms, as 

 tenacious of their undesired union with him as the 

 rats and cockroaches that inhabit his house ? 



We hear most frequently of North America, New 

 Zealand, and Australia in. this connection; but 

 nowhere on the globe has civilization "written 

 strange defeatures " more markedly than on that 

 great area of level country called by English writers 

 the pampas, but by the Spanish more appropriately 

 La Pampa — from the Quichua word signifying open 

 space or country — since it forms in most part one 

 continuous plain, extending on its eastern border 

 from the river Parana, in latitude 32°, to the Pata- 

 gonian formation on the river Colorado, and com- 

 prising about two hundred thousand square miles of 

 humid, grassy country. 



This district has been colonized by Europeans 

 since the middle of the sixteenth century ; but 

 down to within a very few years ago immigration 

 was on too limited a scale to make any very great 

 change; and, speaking only of the pampean 

 country, the conquered territory was a long, thinly. 



