The Land and Wild-life of South America [antikvár]

Preface The South American continent stretches from the tropical Caribbean to storm-swept Cape Horn. Small, as continents go, it is a little more than half the size of Africa, and a third the size of Eurasia. Yet is contains within its borders the greatest continuous tropical rain forest in the world, the largest river and longest continuous mountain chain. Along its western coast lie stretches of true desert. It boasts all kinds of open country; the vast grasslands of the pampas grade northwards into the savannahs of the Chaco and southwards into the wind-swept plains of Patagonia. Temperate rain forests flourish in the shadow of the southern Andes. So great a diversity in climate and topography has long offered innumerable opportunities for the evolutionary radiation of plants and animals. Thus it is not surprising that the South American fauna and flora are among the richest in the world, and in some ways the most pecuhar. Many of South America's plant and animal groups are not known or are poorly represented in other continents, and this becomes the more marked as we go back in time. Our knowledge of the geological history of South America is now sufficiently good to permit the statement that no direct connection with any other continent existed for about 70 million years until the Isthmus of Panama was completed only two or three million years ago. Prior to the rise of the Isthmus the descendants of those animals and plants that at various times had managed to reach South America had evolved in isolation. The peculiar forms of today—the sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos, monkeys, various rodents and marsupials—are the descendants of pre-Isthmian ancestors; the more familiar ones—tapirs, deer, raccoons and cats—came down from the north via Panama. The story is one of the most fascinating in all the long history of life. Man was a late-comer to the Americas. The ancestors of the American Indians arrived in time to see only the last survivors of some of the great groups of mammals that had flourished in earlier days. The human story in South America is a fascinating, colourful and often violent one. This volume is not concerned with it, however, but instead emphasizes the land and its features, and the animals and plants in all their wonderful variety. The editors of this handsome book are fortunate in their author. Anything written by Marston Bates is a delight, and Bates on a theme with the scope of this one—well, the reader may judge for himself Bryan Patterson Museum of Comparative Zoology Harvard University