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If this character were owing merely to immigrants from America, there would be little remarkable in it; but we see that a vast majority of all the land animals, and that more than half of the flowering plants, are aboriginal productions It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or rather the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.
By the way, it's a great pity that he didn't devote a portion of his time to geography and natural history, for then he would have known that there are no icebergs and polar bears in India, or Arabs and burning sands in Patagonia, or wild lions and tigers in Europe.
The sidewalks are crowded, especially on Sundays and holidays, with a dense and varied throng, of so many nationalities and types that it is a valuable lesson in ethnography to sort them, and that a secret uttered is absolutely safe in no tongue, unless, possibly, it be that of Patagonia.
One thought occurs to me: "Look to it that we fall not into like errors." Proceeding south before rounding Cape Horn, we again made the land, and standing in, anchored the ship in a sheltered cove. It was the southern part of that region known as Patagonia. The captain, with Phineas Golding and I, with a crew of eight men, well armed, took the long boat and went ashore.
On the eastern side of the Cordillera, over the same extent of latitude, where a blue sky and a fine climate prove that the atmosphere has been deprived of its moisture by passing over the mountains, the arid plains of Patagonia support a most scanty vegetation.
Last season Lord Hartfield's absence had cast a cloud over the matrimonial horizon. He had been a traveller for more than a year Patagonia, Peru, the Pyramids, Japan, the North Pole society cared not where the fact that he was gone was all-sufficient. Bachelors a shade less eligible came to the front in his absence and became first favourites.
Here again he was baffled in his dealings with the local government by the suspicions of the priests, and never could obtain the means of penetrating beyond the city of San Carlos, so that he decided at last to repair to the Falkland Islands, and make an endeavour thence to reach the people of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, where no hostile Church should put stumbling-blocks in his way.
They "steamed past the low sandy coast of Patagonia and the rugged mountains of Tierra del Fuego, literally, Land of Fire, so called from the custom the inhabitants have of lighting fires on prominent points as signals of assembly." The people are cannibals, and naked.
He has explored the arid jungles of Africa, drawn forth the spotted cobra by his prehensile tail, snowballed the Russian bear on the snowy slopes of Alpine forests, and sold wooden nutmegs to the unsuspecting innocents of Patagonia. He has peddled patent medicines in the Desert of Sahara, and hung his hat and carved his name on the extreme top of the North Pole.
The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage ... the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. In complete contrast to the forest, the bare, treeless, and uninhabited plains of Patagonia "frequently crossed before" Darwin's eyes.
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