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Updated: May 9, 2025
Of the indigenous mammalia, the only one now left of any size, which is common, is the Cervus campestris. This deer is exceedingly abundant, often in small herds, throughout the countries bordering the Plata and in Northern Patagonia. If a person crawling close along the ground, slowly advances towards a herd, the deer frequently, out of curiosity, approach to reconnoitre him.
Like American deer it has the lower ends of the lateral metacarpals remaining, and the antlers are without a brow-tine, but like Cervus it has an incomplete vomer, and unlike deer in general, the antlers are set laterally on the frontal bone, instead of more or less vertically, and the nasal bones are excessively short.
Flocks of mammoths browsed on the plains where, since, the Atlantic has been; the paleotherium, half horse, half tapir, overturned with his tumbling the ant-hills of Montmartre; and the cervus giganteus trembled under the chestnut trees at the growls of the bears of the caverns, who made the dog of Beaugency, three times as big as a wolf, yelp in his den.
I did not doubt that the black soil, which when dry, cakes hard, was entirely of terrestrial origin, but on examining it under the microscope, I found many very minute rounded fragments of shells, amongst which I could distinguish bits of Serpulae and mussels. In a bed of shells, a few feet below the 350 feet bed, I found a horn of the little Cervus humilis, which now inhabits Chiloe.
The mammalia obtained from the bone-earth consisted of Elephas primigenius, or mammoth; Rhinoceros tichorhinus; Ursus spelaeus; Hyaena spelaea; Felis spelaea, or the cave-lion; Cervus tarandus, or the reindeer; a species of horse, ox, and several rodents, and others not yet determined.
Take the one simple quality of speed. We are a creature built for speed, a free swift graceful animal; and among savages this is still seen the capacity for running, mile after mile, hour after hour. Running is as natural a gait for genus homo as for genus cervus.
Among these is the Ursus Americanus, of the black race; a fox; a stag, which perhaps does not differ from the Cervus virginianus, and the common beaver, which feeds on the large leaves of a Pothos, said by the inhabitants to be injurious to man. Besides these are observed a small Vespertilio with short ears, a Mustela, and a Phoca.
Copris Isidis, sexual differences of. Copris lunaris, stridulation of. Corals, bright colours of. Coral-snakes. Cordylus, sexual difference of colour in a species of. Corfu, habits of the Chaffinch in. Cornelius, on the proportions of the sexes in Lucanus Cervus. Corpora Wolffiana, agreement of, with the kidneys of fishes. Correlated variation.
On the banks of the Plata I perceived the air tainted with the odour of the male Cervus campestris, at half a mile to leeward of a herd; and a silk handkerchief, in which I carried home a skin, though often used and washed, retained, when first unfolded, traces of the odour for one year and seven months.
On the pampas there is, strictly speaking, only one ruminant, the Cervus campestris, which is common. The most curious thing about this animal is that the male emits a rank, musky odour, so powerful that when the wind blows from it the effluvium comes in nauseating gusts to the nostrils from a distance exceeding two miles.
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