The most remarkable thing to be said about the vizcacha
is, that although regarded by Mr. Waterhouse, and
others who have studied its affinities, as one of
the lowest of the rodents, exhibiting strong Marsupial
characters, the living animal appears to be more intelligent
than other rodents, not of South America only, but
also of those of a higher type in other continents.
A parallel case is, perhaps, to be found in the hairy
armadillo, an extremely versatile and intelligent
animal, although only an edentate. And among birds
the ypecaha—a large La Plata rail—might
also be mentioned as an example of what ought not
to be; for it is a bold and intelligent bird, more
than a match for the fowl, both in courage and in
cunning; and yet it is one of the family which Professor
Parker—from the point of view of the anatomist—characterizes
as a “feeble-minded, cowardly group.”
THE DYING HUANACO.
Lest any one should misread the title to this chapter,
I hasten to say that the huanaco, or guanaco as it
is often spelt, is not a perishing species; nor, as
things are, is it likely to perish soon, despite the
fact that civilized men, Britons especially, are now
enthusiastically engaged in the extermination of all
the nobler mammalians:—a very glorious
crusade, the triumphant conclusion of which will doubtless
be witnessed by the succeeding generation, more favoured
in this respect than ours. The huanaco, happily
for it, exists in a barren, desolate region, in its
greatest part waterless and uninhabitable to human
beings; and the chapter-heading refers to a singular
instinct of the dying animals, in very many cases
allowed, by the exceptional conditions in which they
are placed, to die naturally.
And first, a few words about its place in nature and
general habits. The huanaco is a small camel—small,
that is, compared with its existing relation—without
a hump, and, unlike the camel of the Old World, non-specializad;
doubtless it is a very ancient animal on the earth,
and for all we know to the contrary, may have existed
contemporaneously with some of the earliest known
representatives of the camel type, whose remains occur
in the lower and upper miocene deposits—Poebrotherium,
Protolabis, Procamelus, Pliauchenia, and Macrauchenia.
It ranges from Tierra del Fuego and the adjacent islands,
northwards over the whole of Patagonia, and along
the Andes into Peru and Bolivia. On the great
mountain chain it is both a wild and a domestic animal,
since the llama, the beast of burden of the ancient
Peruvians, is no doubt only a variety: but as
man’s slave it has changed so greatly from the
original form that some naturalists have regarded
the llama as a distinct species, which, like the camel
of the East, exists only in a domestic state.
It has had time enough to vary, as it is more than
probable that the tamed and useful animal was inherited
by the children of the sun from races and nations
that came before them: and how far back Andean
civilization extends may be inferred from the belief
expressed by the famous American archaeologist, Squiers,
that the ruined city of Tiahuanaco, in the vicinity
of Lake Titicaca, is as old as Thebes and the Pyramids.
