of many existing savages, South America possessed a varied and
striking fauna of enormous beasts--sabre-tooth tigers, huge lions,
mastodons, horses of many kinds, camel-like pachyderms, giant ground-
sloths, mylodons the size of the rhinoceros, and many, many other
strange and wonderful creatures. From some cause, concerning the
nature of which we cannot at present even hazard a guess, this vast
and giant fauna vanished completely, the tremendous catastrophe (the
duration of which is unknown) not being consummated until within a few
thousand or a few score thousand years. When the white man reached
South America he found the same weak and impoverished mammalian fauna
that exists practically unchanged to-day. Elsewhere civilized man has
been even more destructive than his very destructive uncivilized
brothers of the magnificent mammalian life of the wilderness; for ages
he has been rooting out the higher forms of beast life in Europe,
Asia, and North Africa; and in our own day he has repeated the feat,
on a very large scale, in the rest of Africa and in North America. But
in South America, although he is in places responsible for the wanton
slaughter of the most interesting and the largest, or the most
beautiful, birds, his advent has meant a positive enrichment of the
wild mammalian fauna. None of the native grass-eating mammals, the
graminivores, approach in size and beauty the herds of wild or half-
wild cattle and horses, or so add to the interest of the landscape.
There is every reason why the good people of South America should
waken, as we of North America, very late in the day, are beginning to
waken, and as the peoples of northern Europe--not southern Europe--
have already partially wakened, to the duty of preserving from
impoverishment and extinction the wild life which is an asset of such
interest and value in our several lands; but the case against
civilized man in this matter is gruesomely heavy anyhow, when the
plain truth is told, and it is harmed by exaggeration.