Alcide d’Orbigny, from 1825 to 1833 in South America, now (1846) publishing the results on a scale which places him second to Humboldt among South American travellers.
Hail in Buenos Ayres as large as small apples; killed thirteen deer, beside ostriches, which last also it blinded, etc., etc. Dr. Malcomson told him of hail in India, in 1831, which “much injured the cattle.” Stones flat, one ten inches in circumference; passed through windows, making round holes.
A difference in the country about Montevideo and somewhere else attributed to the manuring and grazing of the cattle. Refers to Atwater as saying that the same thing is observed in the prairies of North America, “where coarse grass, between five and six feet high, when grazed by cattle, changes into common pasture land.” (Vide Atwater’s words in Silliman’s North American Journal, vol. i, p. 117.)
I would like to read Azara’s Voyage.
Speaks[196] of the fennel and the cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), introduced from Europe, now very common in those parts of South America. The latter occurs now on both sides the Cordilleras across the continent. In Banda Oriental alone “very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live.... I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.”
Horses first landed at the La Plata in 1535. Now these, with cattle and sheep, have altered the whole aspect of the country,—vegetation, etc. “The wild pig in some parts probably replaces the peccari; packs of wild dogs may be heard howling on the wooded banks of the less frequented streams; and the common cat, altered into a large and fierce animal, inhabits rocky hills.”
At sea, eye being six feet above level, horizon is two and four fifths miles distant. “In like manner, the more level the plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which one would have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed.”
Darwin found a tooth of a native horse contemporary with the mastodon, on the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, though he says there is good evidence against any horse living in America at the time of Columbus. He speaks of their remains being common in North America. Owen has found Darwin’s tooth similar to one Lyell brought from the United States, but unlike any other, fossil or living, and named this American horse Equus curvidens, from a slight but peculiar curvature in it.
The great table-land of southern Mexico makes the division between North and South America with reference to the migration of animals.
Quotes Captain Owen’s “Surveying Voyage” for saying that, at the town of Benguela on the west coast of Africa in a time of great drought, a number of elephants entered in a body to possess themselves of the wells. After a desperate conflict and the loss of one man, the inhabitants—three thousand—drove them off. During a great drought in India, says Dr. Malcomson, “a hare drank out of a vessel held by the adjutant of the regiment.”