120 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



hundred thousand llamas were employed in the mines of Potosi 

 alone. Prescott gives an excellent account of the use of this 

 animal in his Conquest of Peru. They were valued highly for their 

 strength and sureness of foot which were much needed in their 

 long and rugged journeys over the great passes of the Cordilleras, 

 as well as for the excellence of their flesh. 



The only region of a llama's body which is of interest in the 

 present inquiry is the fore-foot, figured in Fig. 47. It presents a 

 very remarkable arrangement of hair on its under surface, just 

 above the double hoof and spongy pad at the joint above the hoof. 

 This is found on each side towards the outer border of the hollow 

 region, and consists of a whorl from which the hairs radiate in a 

 reversed direction towards the upper part and transversely across 

 the rest of the hollow. Prescott speaks of " its spongy hoof, 

 armed with a claw or pointed talon to enable it to secure hold on 

 the ice," and adds that "it never requires to be shod." If one 

 reflects upon the ceaseless action during rough and slippery loco- 

 motion of this animal throughout its working life on mountain 

 passes, on rough stony paths and ice-covered places, one can have 

 no doubt of the reason why this particular joint, so greatly used in 

 maintaining a foothold, should have acquired on this sheltered 

 portion of its hair an animal pedometer. 



The Parti-coloured Bear— ^Eluropus Melanoleucus. 



This is a rare and peculiar form of the family of Ursidse about 

 which I made a statement some years ago at the Zoological Society 

 of London. It is a " stocky " animal with a small head and broad 

 short muzzle, a feature to which it has no right according to its 

 affinities . It is not a member of the high-class Felidse whose special 

 prerogative it is to wear their hair on a short broad muzzle in a 

 downward direction as I showed in Chapter XL Being a more 

 bourgeois creature than a cat it has offended against such sumptuary 

 laws as may exist in the animal kingdom. 



Its hair ought to be worn in the proper backward or upward 

 slope such as other bears, dogs and small carnivores display. 



In my former note I modestly proposed an alternative sugges- 

 tion to the one I now offer, of this aberrant and strange bit of hair- 

 country, and this was that it was correlated with the broad short 

 snout. As I have remarked before this word " correlated " is used 

 so loosely as to mean almost anything the user likes, and it is, in 

 my opinion, a fine source of confusion of thought. Undoubtedly 

 this shape of the muzzle of the Parti-coloured Bear is linked some- 

 how with the arrangement of its hair on that region. But it is 



