molested the foals, a fact which astonished me, as in the Rockies they are the worst enemies of foals.  It was interesting to find that my hosts, and the mixed-blood hunters and ranch workers, combined special knowledge of many of the habits of these big cats with a curious ignorance of other matters concerning them and a readiness to believe fables about them.  This was precisely what I had found to be the case with the old-time North American hunters in discussing the puma, bear, and wolf, and with the English and Boer hunters of Africa when they spoke of the lion and rhinoceros.  Until the habit of scientific accuracy in observation and record is achieved and until specimens are preserved and carefully compared, entirely truthful men, at home in the wilderness, will whole-heartedly accept, and repeat as matters of gospel faith, theories which split the grizzly and black bears of each locality in the United States, and the lions and black rhinos of South Africa, or the jaguars and pumas of any portion of South America, into several different species, all with widely different habits.  They will, moreover, describe these imaginary habits with such sincerity and minuteness that they deceive most listeners; and the result sometimes is that an otherwise good naturalist will perpetuate these fables, as Hudson did when he wrote of the puma.  Hudson was a capital observer and writer when he dealt with the ordinary birds and mammals of the well-settled districts near Buenos Aires and at the mouth of the Rio Negro; but he knew nothing of the wilderness.  This is no reflection on him; his books are great favorites of mine, and are to a large degree models of what such books should be; I only wish that there were hundreds of such writers and observers who would give us similar books for all parts of America.  But it is a mistake to accept him as an authority on that concerning which he was ignorant.

An interesting incident occurred on the day we killed our first jaguar.  We took our lunch beside a small but deep and obviously permanent pond.  I went to the edge to dip up some water, and something growled or bellowed at me only a few feet away.  It was a jacare-tinga or small cayman about five feet long.  I paid no heed to it at the moment.  But shortly afterward when our horses went down to drink it threatened them and frightened them; and then Colonel Rondon and Kermit called me to watch it.  It lay on the surface of the water only a few feet distant from us and threatened us; we threw cakes of mud at it, whereupon it clashed its jaws and made short rushes at us, and when we threw sticks it seized them and crunched them.  We could not drive it away.  Why it should have shown such truculence and heedlessness I cannot imagine, unless perhaps it was a female, with eggs near by.  In another little pond a jacare-tinga showed no less anger when another of my companions approached.  It bellowed, opened its jaws, and lashed its tail.  Yet these pond jacares never actually molested even our dogs in the ponds, far less us on our horses.