Studies at Maldonado.

43

Among the birds of this locality the South American quail (Nothura major) attracted his notice by its numbers. He found that the natives were in the habit of catching them by walking around them in a circle, gradually drawing nearer and nearer, the birds becoming confused and huddling together, until finally they could be knocked over with the hand.

Another method was employed by the children, and consisted in walking around them on a slow horse and throwing a small lasso over them. In this simple manner, says Darwin, a child would take thirty or forty birds a day.

Darwin's studies at Maldonado were carefully made, and as a result he had a large collection representing the fauna of the place. He took eighty species of birds here, nine species of snakes, and many of the large mammals. In hunting the deer he found that it was easily approached on foot, but fled like the wind before a horse. This was due to the fact that every one rode here, and the animals did not recognise an enemy in the unmounted hunter. Darwin took advantage of this, and assuming strange positions so aroused the curiosity of the deer that he could pick them off with ease.

His collection included eight kinds of gnawers, but, best of all, the king of the tribe, the great capybara or Hydrocharus. This singular animal he found in the Maldonado streams in large numbers, which offered him ample opportunities to observe its ways and habits. One, which he shot at Monte Video, weighed nearly one hundred pounds. They were extremely tame, allowing him to approach within

several yards, when they would run into the water and dive, coming up to utter their singular bark. Their tameness he ascribed to the fact that the jaguar had almost disappeared from that locality, and the Gauchos rarely hunted them.

In the woods of Maldonado Darwin often heard curious noises, arising apparently from the ground, and resembling a bark or grunt. Investigation resulted in finding a curious little subterranean and nocturnal animal, the Tucutuco. Many of them were blind or partly so, and we find the naturalist speculating on the subject. "Lamarck," he says, "would have been delighted with this fact had he known it, when speculating (probably with more truth than usual with him) on the gradually acquired blindness of the Aspalax, a gnawer living underground, and of the proteus, a reptile living in dark caverns filled with water; in both of which animals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by a tendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye is extraordinarily small, but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whether it is connected with the true optic nerve; its vision must certainly be imperfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves its burrow. In the Tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the animal; no doubt Lamarck would have said that the tucutuco is now passing into the state of the Aspalax and Proteus."

We observe here that the young naturalist had