July, 1892. 
THE NATURALIST IN LA PLATA. 
147 
evidence calculated to decide them ; and, in addition to all 
this, that the book is written in an earnest spirit and in a 
clear and delightful style, it becomes evident that not all who 
attempt to follow in his steps can hope to equal their 
forerunner. . . . Never has the present writer derived so 
much pleasure and instruction from a book on the habits and 
instincts of animals. He feels sure that it will long continue 
to be a storehouse of facts and observations of the greatest 
value to the philosophical naturalist, while to the general 
reader it will rank as the most interesting and delightful of 
modern books on natural history.” 
The charms of the book, in my opinion, consist in its 
naturalness, it obvious reliability, and the undoubted value 
of the observations it records. Probably the best way to 
induce others to think as I do about it will be to give some 
extracts, and of those chosen I may say they are not selected 
because they are the best passages in the book, but are fair 
samples of the entire contents. 
The first extract is about the 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-settled 
strip, purely pastoral, and the Indians, with their primitive 
mode of warfare, were able to keep back the invaders from the 
greater portion of their ancestral hunting-grounds. Not 
twenty years ago a ride of two hundred miles, starting from 
the capital city, Buenos Ayres, was enough to place one well 
beyond the furthest south-western frontier outpost. In 1879 
the Argentine Government determined to rid the country 
of the aborigines, or, at all events, to break their hostile and 
predatory spirit once for all; with the result that the entire 
area of the grassy pampas, with a great portion of the sterile 
pampas and Patagonia, has been made available to the 
emigrant. There is no longer anything to deter the 
starvelings of the Old World from possessing themselves 
of this new land of promise, flowing, like Australia, with milk 
and tallow, if not with honey ; any emasculated migrant from 
a Genoese or Neapolitan slum is now competent to ‘fight the 
wilderness ’ out there, with his eight-shilling fowling-piece 
and the implements of his trade. The barbarians no longer 
exist to frighten his soul with dreadful war-cries ; they have 
moved away to another more remote and shadowy region, 
called in their own language Alhuemcvpii, and not known to 
geographers. For the results so long and ardently wished for 
have swiftly followed on General Boca’s military expedition ; 
