Note 171 — Chapter III · CONDUCT IN CAPTIVITY.

The selection by animals of a place to die, is not confined to the elephant. Darwin says, that in South America “the guanacos (llamas) appear to have favourite spots for lying down to die; on the banks of the Santa Cruz river, in certain circumscribed spaces which were generally bushy and all near the water, the ground was actually white with their bones: on one such spot I counted between ten and twenty heads.”—Nat. Voy. ch. viii. The same has been remarked in the Rio Gallegos; and at St. Jago in the Cape de Verde Islands, Darwin saw a retired corner similarly covered with the bones of the goat, as if it were “the burial-ground of all the goats in the island.”