The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-03-15

sert and the wild camels, the steppe
 hares, and the "sousliks," or AsiatiC
 prairie dogs, of the corresponding re-
 gions in the Old World The two areas
 of stony steppe had produced an al-
 most identical fauna in two different
 hemispheres.
 But Darwin was more intent on the
 present and past of the creatures ot
 the pampas and the Southern deserts
 than on drawing parallels, or on draw ing differences from the production of lI analogous species on similar tracts of the earth's surface. On the clay steppe
 of the pampas he saw the curious l phenomenon of land capable of sup
 porting animal life in quantities al-
 most without parallel elsewhere, a land where the natural grasses were hind- | cred in their growth neither by shrub
 nor tree, and in parts only broken by
 brilliant flowers, geraniums, scarlet
 verbena, wood sorrel and oenotherae,
 stretching like an Atlantic Ocean of
 green from the sea to the foothills of
 the Cordilleras on the opposite side of
 the continent. Nature seemed to have ! left out every product which would
 otherwise be occupied by the precious
 grasses. There were no useless rocks,
 and almost stones: no trees, to kill 'herbage by their shade; few marches
 or arid belts of sand or salt, no noun
 tains. The steppe offered spontaneous
 ly that monotony of feature which
 agriculture produces elsewhere after | generations of labor. It was the pas- l ture of Romney March multiplied by | hundred thousand, or like some vast
 natural reclamation, made ready for | the fiocks and herds of the continent, Yet to consme this half-mill!on square miles of food, instead of legions of bi- son and wapiti deer, as on the Northern prairies, there were not enough native animals to crop the grasses. South America has no wild oxen, or wild sheep, or goats, or anteopes. Of those mammals which it does possess, the sloths, monkeys and oppossums do not descend further south than the forest line; and on the pampus and the South ern plains there was only one large na- i've ruminant animal the pampas stag, with the puma and jaguar, which have probably been attracted south by the increase of imported animals which serve them as food.
 Add to these the ant-eaters, armadil- los, the ostrich Qhea) and the gorilla. or skunk polecat, both of the last of which have their counterpart on the South African steppe, and the consider able mammals of this steppe are ex- hausted. Darwins belief was that this scarcity of animal life on these plains was almost very recent, and that the splitting up of the continents sof North and South America zoologically was effected by the rising of the high MeXi- can plateau, beyond which few North ern species wandered south, among them being the peccary. puma and opossum. The giant beasts of q pre- vious, though late, period were found both on the pampus and in-North America, when most of the now exist ing shells were living. q know of no other irs ce," Darwin writes. "where manner of the splitting up of one great J region into two well-characterlzed ZOO logical provinces" We think the still later changes in this region, due solely to man, almost as striking Man has filled in the blank left by Nature with a fauna brought there across the ocean. These animals have multiplied faster than ever did the bison herds, and have of the steppe. Even at the beginning of the century these flats were a vast region of emptiness, grazed, it is true, by the troops of wild horses and by | a few deer, though the climate and food on q dn ,1ta n 10 thot i,,i forty-thre years they had spread from | La Plata to the Straits of Magellan, | and were there in use by the Indians. "rhe number of horses and the prof,l- | sion of food are the destruction of all 1 industries" MT. Darwin wrote. Since {, Ahen what struck him as abundance has to a degree which words are to describe. A population l of 45000 British settlers recently owned | 36, 100000 sheep, besides cattle and hor- ses. The whole census of sheep Is over one hundred million; of cattle forty million.
 It was estimated last spring that in the State of Washington, one of the Territories in the extreme northwest of the United States, where wild game is still almost as numerous as in the old lays, there were over one hundred wild deer, with about thirty thousand 'elk," or wapiti. This rough census of the two most numerous spec es of big game in a favorite region and suitable climate is simply Insignificant n comparison with the head of half wild domesticated species now at large