HUDSON, in his “Idle Days in Patagonia,” says IC It is not strange that the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be when nature draws nearer to it, and, taking up her neglected instrument, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on the earth. Perhaps in Patagonia, more than in any other part of the western continent, the traveller feels the touch of aeons of forgotten centuries. He finds himself in a strange, unfinished world. On the west, a belt of volcanic peaks, snow-crested and glacier-dotted, represents the last fiery effort of the Andes to divide the world into two fractions. Cradled in their ramifications lies an extensive system of great lakes of surpassing beauty-lake succeeding lake for a distance of 600 miles from north to south. On all sides are found ancient moraines and the remains if mountains which have been torn to fragments by volcanic action, and vast canons and deep river beds through which streams have sometimes found their way to the Atlantic and then again to the Pacific Ocen, or vice versa, according ta the convulsions of nature. Between the Atlantic coast and this Andean belt rises terrace after terrace, representing one of the greatest Tertiary deposits known. The shingle- and basalt-covered plains are scored by violent rivers and deep, broad depressions. Everywhere are found evidences that the country has been several times submerged and raised. The plains are the home of the guanaco, the huemul, the puma, the American ostrich and countless varieties of the feathered tribe. Primitive man must have found here a rare hunting-ground. His numerous, sturdy descendants, a nomadic hunting race, without trace of agricultural life, presented a bold front to the Spanish conquistador. They had several tribal divisions; the Moluches, or warriors (called Araucanos by the Spaniards), occupied both sides of the Cordillerai in Patagonia, and were subdivided into Pehuenches and Huilliches. The former extended to 350 south lat. and: derived their name from pehuen a pine tree, and chey meaning people. The Huilliches, or southern Moluches, had four subdivisions, and extended along the whole west side of Patagonia south to the Straits of Magellan. The Puelches, or eastern people, so-called by the Moluches, occupied the whole of Patagonia between the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes, but were split into several fractions; the most southern one was known as the Tehuelhets, but called themselves Tehuel-kunny, or southern men, generally known in early writings as Patagones, but in modern times writers have fallen into the error of calling them Tehuelches, applying the Araucano che instead of the Tehuel het to denote people.