uttered queer, querulous cries when they discovered our presence. The
spurred lapwings were as noisy as they always are. The ibis and plover
did not pay any heed to the fish; but the black carrion vultures
feasted on them in the mud; and in the pools that were not dry small
alligators, the jacare-tinga, were feasting also. In many places the
stench from the dead fish was unpleasant.

Then for miles we rode through a beautiful open forest of tall,
slender caranda palms, with other trees scattered among them. Green
parakeets with black heads chattered as they flew; noisy green and red
parrots climbed among the palms; and huge macaws, some entirely blue,
others almost entirely red, screamed loudly as they perched in the
trees or took wing at our approach. If one was wounded its cries kept
its companions circling around overhead. The naturalists found the
bird fauna totally different from that which they had been collecting
in the hill country near Corumba, seventy or eighty miles distant; and
birds swarmed, both species and individuals. South America has the
most extensive and most varied avifauna of all the continents. On the
other hand, its mammalian fauna, although very interesting, is rather
poor in number of species and individuals and in the size of the
beasts. It possesses more mammals that are unique and distinctive in
type than does any other continent save Australia; and they are of
higher and much more varied types than in Australia. But there is
nothing approaching the majesty, beauty, and swarming mass of the
great mammalian life of Africa and, in a less degree, of tropical
Asia; indeed, it does not even approach the similar mammalian life of
North America and northern Eurasia, poor though this is compared with
the seething vitality of tropical life in the Old World. During a
geologically recent period, a period extending into that which saw man
spread over the world in substantially the physical and cultural stage