CHAPTER I.

THE DESERT PAMPAS.


During recent years we have heard much about the great and rapid changes
now going on in the plants and animals of all the temperate regions of
the globe 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 more than satisfied, with our system of
civilization, or method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all
checks on the undue increase of our own species. To one who finds a
charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature's
dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his
journey, is content to perform it on horseback, 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 animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he
cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are
replaced; these are cultivated and domesticated, and have only become
useful to man at the cost of that grace and spirit which freedom and
wildness give. In numbers they are many--twenty-five millions of sheep
in this district, fifty millions in that, a hundred millions in a
third--but how few are the species in place of those 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, beyond his
very own, except the weeds that spring up in his fields under all skies,
ringing him round with old-world monotonous forms, as tenacious of their
undesired union with him as the rats and cockroaches that inhabit his