practice can give to those who are not to the manner born.

This 'wild mirth of the desert,' which the gaucho has known for the last
three centuries, is now passing away, for the rhea's fleetness can no
longer avail him. He may scorn the horse and his rider, what time he
lifts himself up, but the cowardly murderous methods of science, and a
systematic war of extermination, have left him no chance. And with the
rhea go the flamingo, antique and splendid; and the swans in their
bridal plumage; and the rufous tinamou--sweet and mournful melodist of
the eventide; and the noble crested screamer, that clarion-voiced
watch-bird of the night in the wilderness. Those, and the other large
avians, together with the finest of the mammalians, will shortly be lost
to the pampas utterly as the great bustard is to England, and as the
wild turkey and bison and many other species will shortly be lost to
North America. What a wail there would be in the world if a sudden
destruction were to fall on the accumulated art-treasures of the
National Gallery, and the marbles in the British Museum, and the
contents of the King's Library--the old prints and' mediaeval
illuminations! And these are only the work of human hands and
brains--impressions of individual genius on perishable material,
immortal only in the sense that the silken cocoon of the dead moth is
so, because they continue to exist and shine when the artist's hands and
brain are dust:--and man has the long day of life before him in which to
do again things like these, and better than these, if there is any truth
in evolution. But the forms of life in the two higher vertebrate classes
are Nature's most perfect work; and the life of even a single species is
of incalculably greater value to mankind, for what it teaches and would
continue to teach, than all the chiselled marbles and painted canvases
the world contains; though doubtless there are many persons who are
devoted to art, but blind to some things greater than art, who will set