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I.

ANIMALS.

WHAT MR. DARWIN SAW.

THE HORSE.

I

URUGUAY.

ONCE crossed the River Santa Lucia near its mouth,

and was surprised to observe how easily our horses, although not used to swim, passed over a width of at least six hundred yards. On mentioning this at Montevideo, I was told that a vessel containing some mountebanks and their horses being wrecked in the Plata, one horse swam seven miles to the shore. In the course of the day I was amused by the skill with which a Gaucho forced a restive horse to swim a river. He stripped off all his clothes, and, jumping on its back, rode into the water till it was out of its depth; then, slipping off over the crupper, he caught hold of the tail, and as often as the horse turned round the man frightened it back by splashing water in its face. As soon as the horse touched the bottom on the other side, the man pulled himself on, and was firmly seated, bridle in hand, before the horse gained the bank. A naked man on a naked horse is a fine spectacle; I had no idea how well the two animals suited each other. The tail of a horse is a very useful ap

URUGUAY

pendage: I have passed a river in a boat with four people in it, which was ferried across in the same way as the Gaucho. If a man and horse have to cross a broad river, the

A NAKED MAN ON A NAKED HORSE. (ANCIENT GREEK HORSE-RACE.)

best plan is for the man to catch hold of the pommel or mane, and help himself with the other arm.

We were delayed crossing the Rio Colorado by some immense troops of mares, which were swimming the river in order to follow a division of troops into the interior. A more ludicrous spectacle I never beheld than the hundreds and hundreds of heads, all directed one way, with pointed ears and distended nostrils, appearing just above the water, like a great shoal of some amphibious animal. Mares' flesh is the only food which the soldiers have when on an expe dition. This gives them a great facility of movement, for the distance to which horses can be driven over these plains is quite surprising. I have been assured that an unloaded horse can travel a hundred miles a day for many days suc cessively.

At an estancia (grazing farm) near Las Vacas large numbers of mares are weekly slaughtered for the sake of their hides, although worth only five paper dollars apiece. It seems at first strange that it can answer to kill mares for

ARGENTINE REPUBLIC.

such a trifle; but as it is thought ridiculous in this country ever to break in or ride a mare, they are of no value except for breeding. The only thing for which I ever saw mares used was to tread out wheat from the ear; for which purpose they were driven round a circular enclosure, where the wheat-sheaves were strewed.

It is a marvellous fact that in South America a native horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after-ages by the countless herds descended from the few introduced with the Spanish colonists! As the remains of elephants, mastodons, horses, and hollow-horned ruminants are found on both sides of Behring's Straits and on the plains of Siberia, we are led to look to the north-western side of North America as the former point of communication between the Old and the so-called New World. And as so many species, both living and extinct, of these same genera

[graphic]

THRESHING CORN WITH HORSES IN ARMENIA.

inhabit and have inhabited the Old World, it seems most probable that the North American elephants, mastodons,

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