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Show 62 S'l'EPPES AND DESERTS. were made that they gave very little milk. The favorite food of the bison or buffalo is Tripsacum dactyloides (called buffalo grass in North Carolina), and an undescribed species of clover nearly allied to Trifolium repcns, and designated by Barton as Trifolium bisonicum. I have already called attention elsewhere (Cosmos, vol. ii. note 455, English ed.) to the circumstance that, according to a statement of the trustworthy Go mara (Historia General de las Indias, cap. 214), there was still living in the sixteenth century, in the north-west of Mexico, in 40° latitude, an Indian tribe, whose principal riches consisted in herds of tame bisons (bueyes con una giba). But notwithstanding the possibility of taming the bison, notwithstanding the quantity of milk it yields, and notwithstanding the herds of lamas in the Cordilleras of Peru, no pastoral life or pastoral people were found when America was discovered, ::tnd there is no historical evidence of this intermediate stage in the life of nations ever having existed there. It is worthy of remark that the American buffalo or bison has exert3d an influence on the progress of geography in trackless mountainous regions. These animals wander, in the winter, in search of a milder climate, in herds of several thousantls to the south of the Arkansas River. In these migrations their size and unwieldiness make it difficult for them to pass over high mountains. When, therefore, a well-trodden buffalo path is met with, it is advisable to follow it, as being sure to conduct to the most convenient pass across the mountains. The best routes through the Cumberland Mountains, in the south-west parts of Virginia and Kentucky, in the Rocky Mountains between the sources of the Yellow Stone and the Platte, and between the southern branch of the Columbia and the Rio Colorado of California, were thus marked out beforehand by buffalo paths. The advance of settlement and cultivation bas gradually driven the buffalo from all the Eastern States: they formerly roamed on the banks of the Mississippi and of the Ohio far beyond Pittsburg. (Archreologia Americana, vol. ii. 1836, p. 139.) From the granitic cliffs of Diego R.amirez-in the deeply indented and intersected Tierra del Fuego, which contains on the east silurian schists, and on the west the same schists altered by the metamorphic action of subterranean fire, (Darwin's Journal of Researches into the |