Over the Pampas used to roam thousands of guanacos (a creature of the most unlovely type, which resembles both a camel, a mule, a deer, and a horse); here also were Darwin's ostriches (_Rhea Darwinii_) and other game, which were caught by the lasso and by the peculiar "bolas" of the Indians. They used to surround the herds and then massacre them by hundreds. The "tuco tuco" also, which is a burrowing rodent with habits very like those of the prairie dog, finds plenty of sustenance in the abundant grasses. Upon them subsist pumas, foxes, and other carnivores. We have said that the Pampas gradually changes from being very fertile on the east to being almost a desert on the west. Here is the place to mention a very interesting, if not romantic, fact. The guanaco does _not_ travel hundreds of miles in order to die in one particular spot as soon as it feels ill, but it does resort especially to certain spots. There the grass is often a bright, fresh green, for it is plentifully manured, and consequently the guanaco helps to encourage the good grasses to occupy a half-desert. On the eastern side of the Pampas great changes are beginning to appear. The owners of the great camps, haciendas or cattle-ranches let off small parts of their land to Italian "colonists." These people grow crops of Indian corn, and when that has been reaped, the valuable Alfalfa or Lucerne is sown down. This forms the most exquisite and valuable pasture, and consequently far more Shorthorn and Durham cattle can be maintained. There are in South Africa enormous grassy plains, where once springbok and other game used to exist in enormous herds (Wangeman records having seen a herd of antelope four miles long), in spite of lions and other beasts of prey, and in spite also of the Boer, who was as much a horseman as the gaucho or Red Indian. The great buck wagons of South Africa were almost as much the real homes of the Boers as the two-roomed huts which make up his "farms." The great Steppes of Russia and Siberia are also grasslands. "As seen from a distance hills covered by the Stipa grass resemble sand-hills, but, when nearer at hand, the sand-grey colour changes into a silvery white, and these ever-moving grasses remind one of the waves of the ocean and, in spite of their monotony, leave a pleasant impression."[105] [105] Schimper, _l.c._; Drude, _l.c._ Tulips, Hyacinths, Veronicas, Periwinkles, Scotch Thistles, Euphorbias, Wormwoods, and other of our common plants or their near cousins, make up most of the flora of the Steppes. Yet there are hundreds of others, for it is a vegetation very rich in species. If one reads in Gibbon's stately language of the mode of life of the Huns, the Scythians, and those other barbarians who, originating in these huge grasslands, occasionally overflowed and overwhelmed the civilization of declining Rome, the resemblance to Red Indians, Pampas Indians, cowboys, gauchos, and Boers is not a little striking.