The Naturalist in La Plata | Page 3

some writers: and this formation extends
southwards down into Patagonia. Scientists have not yet been able to
explain why the pampas, with a humid climate, and a soil exceedingly
rich, have produced nothing but grass, while the dry, sterile territories
on their north, west, and south borders have an arborescent vegetation.
Darwin's conjecture that the extreme violence of the _pampero,_ or
south-west wind, prevented trees from growing, is now proved to have
been ill-founded since the introduction of the Eucalyptus globulus; for
this noble tree attains to an extraordinary height on the pampas, and
exhibits there a luxuriance of foliage never seen in Australia.
To this level area--my "parish of Selborne," or, at all events, a goodly
portion of it--with the sea on one hand, and on the other the practically
infinite expanse of grassy desert--another sea, not "in vast fluctuations
fixed," but in comparative calm--I should like to conduct the reader in
imagination: a country all the easier to be imagined on account of the
absence of mountains, woods, lakes, and rivers. There is, indeed, little
to be imagined--not even a sense of vastness; and Darwin, touching on
this point, in the _Journal of a Naturalist,_ aptly says:--"At sea, a
person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is
two miles and four-fifths 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 the grandeur which
one would have imagined that a vast plain would have possessed."
I remember my first experience of a hill, after having been always shut
within "these narrow limits." It was one of the range of sierras near
Cape Corrientes, and not above eight hundred feet high; yet, when I
had gained the summit, I was amazed at the vastness of the earth, as it
appeared to me from that modest elevation. Persons born and bred on
the pampas, when they first visit a mountainous district, frequently
experience a sensation as of "a ball in the throat" which seems to
prevent free respiration.
In most places the rich, dry soil is occupied by a coarse grass, three or
four feet high, growing in large tussocks, and all the year round of a
deep green; a few slender herbs and trefoils, with long, twining stems,
maintain a frail existence among the tussocks; but the strong grass
crowds out most plants, and scarcely a flower relieves its uniform
everlasting verdure. There are patches, sometimes large areas, where it
does not grow, and these are carpeted by small creeping herbs of a
livelier green, and are gay in spring with flowers, chiefly of the
composite and papilionaceous kinds; and verbenas, scarlet, purple, rose,
and white. On moist or marshy grounds there are also several lilies,
yellow, white, and red, two or three flags, and various other small
flowers; but altogether the flora of the pampas is the poorest in species
of any fertile district on the globe. On moist clayey ground flourishes
the stately pampa grass, Gynerium argenteum, the spears of which
often attain a height of eight or nine feet. I have ridden through many
leagues of this grass with the feathery spikes high as my head, and
often higher. It would be impossible for me to give anything like an
adequate idea of the exquisite loveliness, at certain times and seasons,
of this queen of grasses, the chief glory of the solitary pampa. Everyone
is familiar with it in cultivation; but the garden-plant has a sadly
decaying, draggled look at all times, and to my mind, is often positively
ugly with its dense withering mass of coarse leaves, drooping on the
ground, and bundle of spikes, always of the same dead white or dirty
cream-colour. Now colour--the various ethereal tints that give a blush
to its cloud-like purity--is one of the chief beauties of this grass on its

native soil; and travellers who have galloped across the pampas at a
season of the year when the spikes are dead, and white as paper or
parchment, have certainly missed its greatest charm. The plant is social,
and in some places where scarcely any other kind exists it covers large
areas with a sea of fleecy-white plumes; in late summer, and in autumn,
the tints are seen, varying from the most delicate rose, tender and
illusive as the blush on the white under-plumage of some gulls, to
purple and violaceous. At no time does it look so perfect as in the
evening, before and after sunset, when the softened light imparts a
mistiness to the crowding plumes, and the traveller cannot help
fancying that the tints, which then seem richest, are caught from the
level rays of the sun, or reflected from the coloured vapours of the