If a pastoral life—that beneficent intermediate stage which binds nomadic bands of hunters to fruitful pasture lands, and at the same time promotes agriculture—was unknown to the primitive races of America, it is to the very ignorance of such a mode of life that we must attribute the scantiness of population in the South American Steppes. But this circumstance allowed freer scope for the forces of nature to develop themselves in the most varied forms of animal life; a freedom only circumscribed by themselves, like vegetable life in the forests of the Orinoco, where the Hymenæa and the giant laurel, exempt from the ravages of man, are only in danger of a too luxuriant embrace of the plants which surround them. Agoutis, small spotted antelopes, the shielded Armadillo, which, rat-like, terrifies the hare in its subterranean retreat; herds of slothful Chiguires, beautifully striped Viverræ, whose pestilential odour infects the air; the great maneless Lion; the variegated Jaguar (commonly known as the tiger), whose strength enables it to drag to the summit of a hill the body of the young bull it has slain—these, and many other forms of animal life[30] roam over the treeless plain. This region, which may be regarded as peculiarly the habitation of wild animals, would not have been chosen as a place of settlement by nomadic hordes, who like the Indo-Asiatics generally prefer a vegetable diet, had it not possessed some few fan-palms (_Mauritia_) scattered here and there. The beneficent qualities of this tree of life have been universally celebrated.[31] Upon this alone subsist the unsubdued tribe of the Guaranes, at the mouth of the Orinoco northward of the Sierra de Imataca. When they increased in numbers and became over-crowded, it is said that, besides the huts which they built on horizontal platforms supported by the stumps of felled palm-trees, they also ingeniously suspended from stem to stem spreading mats or hammocks woven of the leaf-stalk of the Mauritia, which enabled them, during the rainy season, when the Delta was overflowed, to live in trees in the manner of apes. These pendent huts were partly covered with clay. The women kindled the fire necessary for their culinary occupations on the humid flooring. As the traveller passed by night along the river, his attention was attracted by a long line of flame suspended high in the air, and apparently unconnected with the earth. The Guaranes owe the preservation of their physical, and perhaps even of their moral independence, to the loose marshy soil, over which they move with fleet and buoyant foot, and to their lofty sylvan domiciles; a sanctuary whither religious enthusiasm would hardly lead an American Stylite.[32]