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Show 146 PAMPAS. Oct. 1833. a cliff about sixty feet high over the Parana. The river here is very broad, with many islands, which. are low and wooded as is also the coast of the opposite shore. The view w~uld resemble that of a great lake, if it were not for the linear-shaped islets, which alone give the idea of running water. The cliffs are the most picturesque part; sometimes they are absolutely perpendicular, and of a ~ed colour ; at other times in large broken masses, covered with cacti and mimosa-trees. The real grandeur, ho~ever, o~ an immense river like this, is derived from re:flectmg ~ow Important a means of communicl!l-tion and commerce,. It for~~ between one nation and another; to what a distance It travels ; and from how vast a territory it drains the great body of fresh water which flows past your feet. . For many leagues north and south of San NICholas ~nd Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely any thmg which travellers have written about its extreme :flatness, can he considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find a spot where by slowly turning round, objects were not seen' at great' er distances in some directions than m. oth ers ; and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surf~ce of the wa~er, his horizon is two miles and four-fifths distant. In hke manner, the more level the plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow limits: and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur, which one would have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed. OcToBER lsT.-We started by moonlight and arrived at the Rio Tercero by sunrise. This river is also called the Saladillo, and it deserves the name, for the water is brackish. I staid here the greater part of the day, searching for fossil bones. Falconer mentions having seen, in the bed of this river, great bones, and the case of a giant armadillo. By good fortune, I discovered a tooth embedded in a layer of rock marl, which was afterwards found exactly to fit the socket in the head of a strange animal, the Toxodon, which Oct. 1833. MASTODON. 147 will presently be mentioned. Hearing also of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff. They were, however, so completely decayed, that I could only bring away small fragments of one of the great molar-teeth; but these were sufficient to show that the remains belonged to a species of Mastodon. The men who took me in the canoe, said they had long known of them, and had often wondered how they had got there : the necessity of a theory being felt, they came to the conclusion, that, like the bizcacha, the mastodon formerly was a burrowing animal ! In the evening we rode another stage, and crossed the Monge, another brackish stream, bearing the dregs of the washings of the Pampas. OcTOBER 2o.- We passed through Corunda, which, from the luxuriance of its gardens, was one of the prettiest villages I saw. From this point to St. Fe the road is not very safe. The western side of the Parana further northward, ceases to be inhabited ; and hence the Indians sometimes come down, and waylay travellers. The nature of the country also favours this, for instead of a grassy plain, there is an open woodland, composed of low prickly mimosas. We passed some houses that had been ransacked and since deserted; we saw also a spectacle, which my guides viewed with high satisfaction; it was the skeleton of an Indian with the dried skin hanging on the bones, suspended to the branch of a tree. In the morning we arrived at St. Fe. I was surprised to observe how great a change of climate a difference of only three degrees of latitude between this place and Buenos Ayres had caused. This was e·vident from the dress ,and complexion of the men-from the increased size of the ombutrees- the number of new cacti and other plants-and especially from the birds. In the course of an hour I remarked L2 |