2 
The Nahiralist in La Plata, 
that grace and spirit wliicli 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 
vyhen 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 himj 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 
i]ic 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- 
