Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.3)

Oct. 1836. CONCLUSION. 605 filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature : — no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. In calhng up images of the past, I find the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes : yet these plains are pro- nounced by all most wretched and useless. They are characterized only by negative possessions ; without habi- tations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm possession of the memory ? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression ? I can scarcely analyze these feelings : but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely practicable, and hence unknown : they bear the stamp of having thus lasted for ages, and there appears no limit to their duration through future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined sensations ? Lastly, of natural scenery, the views from lofty mountains, though certainly in one sense not beautiful, are very memor- able. When looking down from the crest of the highest Corddlera, the mind undisturbed by minute details, was filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses. Of individual objects, perhaps no one is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a real barbarian, — of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been such as these ? Men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals ; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of