CHAPTER VII 

 Buenos Ayres and St. Ft 



Excursion to St. Fe— -Thistle Beds — Habits of the Bizcacha — Little 

 Owl — Saline Streams — Level Plains — Mastodon — St. Fe — Change 

 in Landscape — Geology — Tooth of extinct Horse — Relation of the 

 Fossil and recent Quadrupeds of North and South America — 

 Effects of a great Drought — Parana — Habits of the Jaguar — 

 Scissor-beak — Kingfisher, Parrot, and Scissor-tail — Revolution — 

 Buenos Ayres — State of Government. 



SEPTEMBER 27th.— In the evening I set out on an 



excursion to St. Fe, which is situated nearly three hun- 



dred English miles from Buenos Ayres, on the banks of 

 the Parana. The roads in the neighbourhood of the city after 

 the rainy weather, were extraordinarily bad. I should never 

 have thought it possible for a bullock waggon to have 

 crawled along : as it was, they scarcely went at the rate of a 

 mile an hour, and a man was kept ahead, to survey the best 

 line for making the attempt. The bullocks were terribly 

 jaded: it is a great mistake to suppose that with improved 

 roads, and an accelerated rate of travelling, the sufferings of 

 the animals increase in the same proportion. We passed a 

 train of waggons and a troop of beasts on their road to 

 Mendoza. The distance is about 580 geographical miles, and 

 the journey is generally performed in fifty days. These 

 waggons are very long, narrow, and thatched with reeds; 

 they have only two wheels, the diameter of which in some 

 cases is as much as ten feet. Each is drawn by six bullocks, 

 which are urged on by a goad at least twenty feet long : this 

 is suspended from within the roof; for the wheel bullocks a 

 smaller one is kept; and for the intermediate pair, a point 

 projects at right angles from the middle of the long one. 

 The whole apparatus looked like some implement of war. 

 September 28th. — We passed the small town of Luxan, 

 where there is a wooden bridge over the river — a most unus- 



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