The Naturalist in La Plata

colonized by Europeans. These changes, if taken merely as evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing to those who are satisfied, and m

eback, or in a waggon drawn by bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth's surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and beautiful forms, both of the a

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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, bey

l 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, ext

wn to within a very few years ago immigration was on too limited a scale to make any very great

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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

now rapidly sweeping away the

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, from the field naturalist's point of view, of the great plain, as it existed before the agencies

rticans) is the most common; hence the name of "Cha?ar-steppe" used by some writers: and this formation extends southwards down into Patagonia. Scientists have not yet been able to explain why the pampas, with a humid climate, and a soil exceedingly rich, have produced nothing but grass, while the dry, sterile territories on their north, west, and south borders hav

goodly portion of it--with the sea on one hand, and on the other t

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be imagined--not even a sense of vastness; and Darwin, touching on this point, in the Journal of a Naturalist, aptly says:--"At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is two miles and four-fifths dista

ve eight hundred feet high; yet, when I had gained the summit, I was amazed at the vastness of the earth, as it appeared to me from that modest elevation. Persons born an

s, and all the year round of a deep green; a few slender herbs and trefoils, with long, twining stems, maintain a

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ground flourishes the stately pampa grass, Gynerium argenteum, the spears of which often attain a height of eight or nine feet. I have ridden through many leagues of this grass with the feathery spikes high as my head, and often higher. It would be impossible for me to give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite loveliness, at certain times and seasons, of this queen of grasses, the chief glory of the solitary pampa. Everyone is familiar with it in cultivation; but the garden-plant has a sadly decaying, draggled look at all times, and

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e blush on the white under-plumage of some gulls, to purple and violaceous. At no time does it look so perfect as in the evening, before and after sunset, when the softened light imparts a mistiness to

and for two hours we had ridden through the matchless grass, which spread away for miles on every side, the myriads of white spears, touched with varied colour, blending in the distance and appearing almost like the surface of a cloud. Hearing a swishing sound behind us, we turned sharply round, and saw, not forty yards away in our rear, a par