The Work of the Field Zoologist
and Field Geographer in South America
Portions of South America are now entering on a career of great social
and industrial development. Much remains to be known, so far as the
outside world is concerned, of the social and industrial condition in
the long-settled interior regions. More remains to be done, in the way
of pioneer exploring and of scientific work, in the great stretches of
virgin wilderness. The only two other continents where such work, of
like volume and value, remains to be done are Africa and Asia; and
neither Africa nor Asia offers a more inviting field for the best kind
of field worker in geographical exploration and in zoological,
geological, and paleontological investigation. The explorer is merely
the most adventurous kind of field geographer; and there are two or
three points worth keeping in mind in dealing with the South American
work of the field geographer and field zoologist.
Roughly, the travellers who now visit (like those who for the past
century have visited) South America come in three categories--
although, of course, these categories are not divided by hard-and-fast
lines.
First, there are the travellers who skirt the continent in comfortable
steamers, going from one great seaport to another, and occasionally
taking a short railway journey to some big interior city not too far
from the coast. This is a trip well worth taking by all intelligent
men and women who can afford it; and it is being taken by such men and
women with increasing frequency. It entails no more difficulty than a
similar trip to the Mediterranean--than such a trip which to a learned
and broad-minded observer offers the same chance for acquiring
knowledge and, if he is himself gifted with wisdom, the same chance of
imparting his knowledge to others that is offered by a trip of similar
length through the larger cities of Europe or the United States.
Probably the best instance of the excellent use to which such an
observer can put his experience is afforded by the volume of Mr.
Bryce. Of course, such a trip represents travelling of essentially the
same kind as travelling by railroad from Atlanta to Calgary or from
Madrid to Moscow.
Next there are the travellers who visit the long-settled districts and
colonial cities of the interior, travelling over land or river
highways which have been traversed for centuries but which are still
primitive as regards the inns and the modes of conveyance. Such
travelling is difficult in the sense that travelling in parts of Spain
or southern Italy or the Balkan states is difficult. Men and women who
have a taste for travel in out-of-way places and who, therefore, do
not mind slight discomforts and inconveniences have the chance
themselves to enjoy, and to make others profit by, travels of this
kind in South America. In economic, social, and political matters the
studies and observations of these travellers are essential in order to
supplement, and sometimes to correct, those of travellers of the first
category; for it is not safe to generalize overmuch about any country
merely from a visit to its capital or its chief seaport. These
travellers of the second category can give us most interesting and
valuable information about quaint little belated cities; about
backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who show a mixture of
the ideas of savagery with the ideas of an ancient peasantry; and
about rough old highways of travel which in comfort do not differ much
from those of mediaeval Europe. The travellers who go up or down the
highway rivers that have been travelled for from one to four hundred
years--rivers like the Paraguay and Parana, the Amazon, the Tapajos,
the Madeira, the lower Orinoco--come in this category. They can add
little to our geographical knowledge; but if they are competent
zoologists or archaeologists, especially if they live or sojourn
long in a locality, their work may be invaluable from the scientific
standpoint. The work of the archaeologists among the immeasurably
ancient ruins of the low-land forests and the Andean plateaux is of
this kind. What Agassiz did for the fishes of the Amazon and what
Hudson did for the birds of the Argentine are other instances of the
work that can thus be done. Burton's writings on the interior of
Brazil offer an excellent instance of the value of a sojourn or trip
of this type, even without any especial scientific object.
Of course travellers of this kind need to remember that their
experiences in themselves do not qualify them to speak as wilderness
explorers. Exactly as a good archaeologist may not be competent to
speak of current social or political problems, so a man who has done
capital work as a tourist observer in little-visited cities and along
remote highways must beware of regarding himself as being thereby
rendered fit for genuine wilderness work or competent to pass judgment
on the men who do such work. To cross the Andes on mule-back along the
regular routes is a feat comparable to the feats of the energetic
tourists who by thousands traverse the mule trails in out-of-the-way
nooks of Switzerland. An ordinary trip on the highway portions of the
Amazon, Paraguay, or Orinoco in itself no more qualifies a man to
speak of or to take part in exploring unknown South American rivers
than a trip on the lower Saint Lawrence qualifies a man to regard
himself as an expert in a canoe voyage across Labrador or the Barren
Grounds west of Hudson Bay.
A hundred years ago, even seventy or eighty years ago, before the age
of steamboats and railroads, it was more difficult than at present to
define the limits between this class and the next; and, moreover, in
defining these limits I emphatically disclaim any intention of thereby
attempting to establish a single standard of value for books of
travel. Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" is to me the best book of the
kind ever written; it is one of those classics which decline to go
into artificial categories, and which stand by themselves; and yet
Darwin, with his usual modesty, spoke of it as in effect a yachting
voyage. Humboldt's work had a profound effect on the thought of the
civilized world; his trip was one of adventure and danger; and yet it
can hardly be called exploration proper. He visited places which had
been settled and inhabited for centuries and traversed places which
had been travelled by civilized men for years before he followed in
their footsteps. But these places were in Spanish colonies, and access
to them had been forbidden by the mischievous and intolerant tyranny--
ecclesiastical, political, and economic--which then rendered Spain the
most backward of European nations; and Humboldt was the first
scientific man of intellectual independence who had permission to
visit them. To this day many of his scientific observations are of
real value. Bates came to the Amazon just before the era of Amazonian
steamboats. He never went off the native routes of ordinary travel.
But he was a devoted and able naturalist. He lived an exceedingly
isolated, primitive, and laborious life for eleven years. Now, half a
century after it was written, his "Naturalist on the Amazon" is as
interesting and valuable as it ever was, and no book since written has
in any way supplanted it.
Travel of the third category includes the work of the true wilderness
explorers who add to our sum of geographical knowledge and of the
scientific men who, following their several bents, also work in the
untrodden wilds. Colonel Rondon and his associates have done much in
the geographical exploration of unknown country, and Cherrie and
Miller have penetrated and lived for months and years in the wastes,
on their own resources, as incidents to their mammalogical and
ornithological work. Professor Farrabee, the anthropologist, is a
capital example of the man who does this hard and valuable type of
work.
An immense amount of this true wilderness work, geographical and
zoological, remains to be done in South America. It can be
accomplished with reasonable thoroughness only by the efforts of very
many different workers, each in his own special field. It is desirable
that here and there a part of the work should be done in outline by
such a geographic and zoological reconnaissance as ours; we would, for
example, be very grateful for such work in portions of the interior of
the Guianas, on the headwaters of the Xingu, and here and there along
the eastern base of the Andes.
But as a rule the work must be specialized; and in its final shape it
must be specialized everywhere. The first geographical explorers of
the untrodden wilderness, the first wanderers who penetrate the wastes
where they are confronted with starvation, disease, and danger and
death in every from, cannot take with them the elaborate equipment
necessary in order to do the thorough scientific work demanded by
modern scientific requirements. This is true even of exploration done
along the courses of unknown rivers; it is more true of the
exploration, which must in South America become increasingly
necessary, done across country, away from the rivers.
The scientific work proper of these early explorers must be of a
somewhat preliminary nature; in other words the most difficult and
therefore ordinarily the most important pieces of first-hand exploration
are precisely those where the scientific work of the accompanying
cartographer, geologist, botanist, and zoologist must be furthest
removed from finality. The zoologist who works to most advantage in
the wilderness must take his time, and therefore he must normally
follow in the footsteps of, and not accompany, the first explorers.
The man who wishes to do the best scientific work in the wilderness
must not try to combine incompatible types of work nor to cover too
much ground in too short a time.
There is no better example of the kind of zoologist who does first-
class field-work in the wilderness than John D. Haseman, who spent
from 1907 to 1910 in painstaking and thorough scientific investigation
over a large extent of South American territory hitherto only
partially known or quite unexplored. Haseman's primary object was to
study the characteristics and distribution of South American fishes,
but as a matter of fact he studied at first hand many other more or
less kindred subjects, as may be seen in his remarks on the Indians
and in his excellent pamphlet on "Some Factors of Geographical
Distribution in South America."
Haseman made his long journey with a very slender equipment, his
extraordinarily successful field-work being due to his bodily health
and vigor and his resourcefulness, self-reliance, and resolution. His
writings are rendered valuable by his accuracy and common sense. The
need of the former of these two attributes will be appreciated by
whoever has studied the really scandalous fictions which have been
published as genuine by some modern "explorers" and adventurers in
South America; and the need of the latter by whoever has studied
some of the wild theories propounded in the name of science concerning
the history of life on the South American continent. There is,
however, one serious criticism to be made on Haseman: the extreme
obscurity of his style--an obscurity mixed with occasional bits of
scientific pedantry, which makes it difficult to tell whether or not
on some points his thought is obscure also. Modern scientists, like
modern historians and, above all, scientific and historical educators,
should ever keep in mind that clearness of speech and writing is
essential to clearness of thought and that a simple, clear, and, if
possible, vivid style is vital to the production of the best work in
either science or history. Darwin and Huxley are classics, and they
would not have been if they had not written good English. The thought
is essential, but ability to give it clear expression is only less
essential. Ability to write well, if the writer has nothing to write
about, entitles him to mere derision. But the greatest thought is
robbed of an immense proportion of its value if expressed in a mean or
obscure manner. Mr. Haseman has such excellent thought that it is a
pity to make it a work of irritating labor to find out just what the
thought is. Surely, if he will take as much pains with his writing as
he has with the far more difficult business of exploring and
collecting, he will become able to express his thought clearly and
forcefully. At least he can, if he chooses, go over his sentences
until he is reasonably sure that they can be parsed. He can take pains
to see that his whole thought is expressed, instead of leaving
vacancies which must be filled by the puzzled and groping reader. His
own views and his quotations from the views of others about the static
and dynamic theories of distribution are examples of an important
principle so imperfectly expressed as to make us doubtful whether it
is perfectly apprehended by the writer. He can avoid the use of those
pedantic terms which are really nothing but offensive and,
fortunately, ephemeral scientific slang. There has been, for instance,
a recent vogue for the extensive misuse, usually tautological misuse,
of the word "complexus"--an excellent word if used rarely and for
definite purposes. Mr. Haseman drags it in continually when its use is
either pointless and redundant or else serves purely to darken wisdom.
He speaks of the "Antillean complex" when he means the Antilles, of
the "organic complex" instead of the characteristic or bodily
characteristics of an animal or species, and of the "environmental
complex" when he means nothing whatever but the environment. In short,
Mr. Haseman and those whose bad example he in this instance follows
use "complexus" in much the same spirit as that displayed by the
famous old lady who derived religious--instead of scientific--
consolation from the use of "the blessed word Mesopotamia."
The reason that it is worth while to enter this protest against Mr.
Haseman's style is because his work is of such real and marked value.
The pamphlet on the distribution of South American species shows that
to exceptional ability as a field worker he adds a rare power to draw,
with both caution and originality, the necessary general conclusions
from the results of his own observations and from the recorded studies
of other men; and there is nothing more needed at the present moment
among our scientific men than the development of a school of men who,
while industrious and minute observers and collectors and cautious
generalizers, yet do not permit the faculty of wise generalization to
be atrophied by excessive devotion to labyrinthine detail.
Haseman upholds with strong reasoning the theory that since the
appearance of all but the lowest forms of life on this globe there
have always been three great continental masses, sometimes solid
sometimes broken, extending southward from the northern hemisphere,
and from time to time connected in the north, but not in the middle
regions or the south since the carboniferous epoch. He holds that life
has been intermittently distributed southward along these continental
masses when there were no breaks in their southward connection, and
intermittently exchanged between them when they were connected in the
north; and he also upholds the view that from a common ancestral form
the same species has been often developed in entirely disconnected
localities when in these localities the conditions of environment were
the same.
The opposite view is that there have been frequent connections between
the great land masses, alike in the tropics, in the south temperate
zone, and in the Antarctic region. The upholders of this theory base
it almost exclusively on the distribution of living and fossil forms
of life; that is, it is based almost exclusively on biological and not
geological considerations. Unquestionably, the distribution of many
forms of life, past and present, offers problems which with our
present paleontological knowledge we are wholly unable to solve. If we
consider only the biological facts concerning some one group of
animals it is not only easy but inevitable to conclude that its
distribution must be accounted for by the existence of some former
direct land bridge extending, for instance, between Patagonia and
Australia, or between Brazil and South Africa, or between the West
Indies and the Mediterranean, or between a part of the Andean region
and northeastern Asia. The trouble is that as more groups of animals
are studied from the standpoint of this hypothesis the number of such
land bridges demanded to account for the existing facts of animal
distribution is constantly and indefinitely extended. A recent book by
one of the most learned advocates of this hypothesis calls for at
least ten such land bridges between South America and all the other
continents, present and past, of the world since a period geologically
not very remote. These land bridges, moreover, must, many of them,
have been literally bridges; long, narrow tongues of land thrust in
every direction across the broad oceans. According to this view the
continental land masses have been in a fairly fluid condition of
instability. By parity of reasoning, the land bridges could be made a
hundred instead of merely ten in number. The facts of distribution are
in many cases inexplicable with our present knowledge; yet if the
existence of widely separated but closely allied forms is habitually
to be explained in accordance with the views of the extremists of this
school we could, from the exclusive study of certain groups of
animals, conclude that at different periods the United States and
almost every other portion of the earth were connected by land and
severed from all other regions by water--and, from the study of
certain other groups of animals, arrive at directly opposite and
incompatible conclusions.
The most brilliant and unsafe exponent of this school was Ameghino,
who possessed and abused two gifts, both essential to the highest type
of scientist, and both mischievous unless this scientist possess a
rare and accurate habit of thought joined to industry and mastery of
detail:--namely, the gift of clear and interesting writing, and the
gift of generalization. Ameghino rendered marked services to
paleontology. But he generalized with complete recklessness from the
slenderest data; and even these data he often completely misunderstood
or misinterpreted. His favorite thesis included the origin of
mammalian life and of man himself in southernmost South America, with,
as incidents, the belief that the mammalian-bearing strata of South
America were of much greater age than the strata with corresponding
remains elsewhere; that in South America various species and genera of
men existed in tertiary times, some of them at least as advanced as
fairly well advanced modern savages; that there existed various land
bridges between South America and other southern continents, including
Africa; and that the ancestral types of modern mammals and of man
himself wandered across one of these bridges to the old world, and
that thence their remote descendants, after ages of time, returned to
the new. In addition to valuable investigations of fossil-bearing beds
in the Argentine, he made some excellent general suggestions, such as
that the pithecoid apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of
man's ancestral stem but represent a divergence from it away from
humanity and toward a retrogressive bestialization. But of his main
theses he proves none, and what evidence we have tells against them.
At the Museum of La Plata I found that the authorities were
practically a unit in regarding his remains of tertiary men and proto-
men as being either the remains of tertiary American monkeys or of
American Indians from strata that were long post-tertiary. The
extraordinary discovery, due to that eminent scientist and public
servant Doctor Moreno, of the remains of man associated with the
remains of the great extinct South American fauna, of the mylodon, of
a giant ungulate, of a huge cat like the lion, and of an extraordinary
aberrant horse (of a wholly different genus from the modern horse)
conclusively shows that in its later stages the South American fauna
consisted largely of types that elsewhere had already disappeared and
that these types persisted into what was geologically a very recent
period only some tens of thousands of years ago, when savage man of
practically a modern type had already appeared in South America. The
evidence we have, so far as it goes, tends to show that the South
American fauna always has been more archaic in type than the arctogeal
fauna of the same chronological level.
To loose generalizations, and to elaborate misinterpretations of
paleontological records, the kind of work done by Mr. Haseman
furnishes an invaluable antiscorbutic. To my mind, he has established
a stronger presumption in favor of the theory he champions than has
been established in favor of the theories of any of the learned and
able scientific men from whose conclusions he dissents. Further
research, careful, accurate, and long extended, can alone enable us to
decide definitely in the matter; and this research, to be effective,
must be undertaken by many men, each of whom shall in large measure
possess Mr. Haseman's exceptional power of laborious work both in the
field and in the study, his insight and accuracy of observation, and
his determination to follow truth with inflexible rectitude wherever
it may lead--one of the greatest among the many great qualities which
lifted Huxley and Darwin above their fellows.