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 house?
We hear most frequently of North America, New Zealand,
and Australia in this connection; but nowhere on the
globe has civilization “written strange defeatures”
more markedly than on that great area of level 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, extending
on its eastern border from the river Parana, in latitude
32 degrees, to the Patagonian formation on the river
Colorado, and comprising about two hundred thousand
square miles of humid, grassy country.
This district has been colonized by Europeans since
the middle of the sixteenth century; but down to within
a very few years ago immigration was on too limited
a scale to make any very great change; and, speaking
only of the pampean country, the conquered territory
was a long, thinly-settled strip, purely pastoral,
and the Indians, with their primitive mode of warfare,
were able to keep back the invaders from the greater
portion of their ancestral hunting-grounds. Not
