 CHAPTER 16 EARTHQUAKE STEP-FORMED TERRORS APSENSE OF RECENT DEPOSITS CONTEMPERANEOUSNESS OF THE TERSHERY FORMATIONS EXCUSION UP THE VALLEY ROAD TO GUASCO DESERTS VALLEY OF GOPIAPO RAIN AND EARTHQUAKES HYDROPHOBIA THE DESPO VLADO INDIAN RUINS PROBABLE CHANGE OF CLIMATE RIVERBED ARCHED BY AN EARTHQUAKE COLD GAILS OF WIND NOISES FROM A HILL IQUIQUE SOLTOLUVIUM NITRATE OF SODA LIMA UNHEALTHY COUNTRY RUINS OF GAIAU OVERTHROWN BY AN EARTHQUAKE RECENT SUBSTANCE ELEVATED SHELDS ON SAN LORENSO THEIR DECOMPOSITION PLANE WITH EMBEDDED SHELDS AND FRAGMENTS OF POTTERY ANTIQUITY OF THE INDIAN RACE APRIL 27th I set out on a journey to Kokimbo and then through Guasco to Kokiapo where Captain Fitzroy kindly offered to pick me up in the beagle. The distance in a straight line along the shore northward is only 420 miles, but my mode of travelling made it a very long journey. I bought four horses and two mules, the latter carrying the luggage on alternate days. The six animals together only cost the value of twenty-five pounds sterling, and at Kokiapo I sold them again for twenty-three. We travelled in the same independent manner as before, cooking our own meals and sleeping in the open air. As we rode towards the Vino del Mar, I took a farewell view of Valparaiso and admired its picturesque appearance. For geological purposes I made a detour from the high road to the foot of the bell of Guyota. We passed through an alluvial district rich in gold to the neighbourhood of Limache where we slept. Washing for gold supports the inhabitants of numerous hovels scattered along the sides of each little rivulet, but like all those whose gains are uncertain, they are unthrifty in all their habits and consequently poor. XXVIII. In the afternoon we arrived at a cottage at the foot of the bell mountain. The inhabitants were freeholders, which is not very usual in Chile. They supported themselves on the produce of a garden and a little field, but were very poor. Capital is here so deficient that the people are obliged to sell their green corn while standing in the field in order to buy necessaries for the ensuing year. Wheat in consequence was dearer in the very district of its production than at Valparaiso where the contractors live. The next day we joined the main road to Coquimbo. At night there was a very light shower of rain. This was the first drop that had fallen since the heavy rain of September 11th and 12th, which detained me a prisoner at the baths of Gauguenes. The interval was seven and a half months, but the rain this year in Chile was rather later than usual. The distant Andes were now covered by a thick mass of snow and were a glorious site. XXVIII. The road continued to follow the coast, at no great distance from the sea. The few trees and bushes which are common in central Chile decreased rapidly in numbers and were replaced by a tall plant, something like a yucca in appearance. The surface of the country, on a small scale, was singularly broken and irregular, abrupt little peaks of rock rising out of small plains or basins. The indented coast and the bottom of the neighbouring sea, studded with breakers, wood, if converted into dry land, present similar forms, and such a conversion without doubt has taken place in the part over which we rode. XXVIII. Quilimari to Conchalín. The country became more and more barren. In the valleys there was scarcely sufficient water for any irrigation, and the intermediate land was quite bare, not supporting even goats. In the spring after the winter showers, a thin pasture rapidly springs up, and cattle are then driven down from the Cordillera to graze for a short time. It is curious to observe how the seeds of the grass and other plants seem to accommodate themselves as if by an acquired habit, to the quantity of rain which falls upon different parts of this coast. One shower far northward at Copiapo produces as great an effect on the vegetation as two at Huáscoe, and three or four in this district. At Valparaiso, a winter so dry as greatly to injure the pasture, would at Huáscoe produce the most unusual abundance. Proceeding northward, the quantity of rain does not appear to decrease in strict proportion to the latitude. At Conchalín, which is only sixty-seven miles north of Valparaiso, rain is not expected till the end of May, whereas at Valparaiso some generally falls early in April. The annual quantity is likewise small in proportion to the lateness of the season at which it commences. Fourth. Finding the coast road devoid of interest of any kind, we turned inland towards the mining district and valley of Iapel. This valley, like every other in Chile, is level, broad, and very fertile. It is bordered on each side, either by cliffs of stratified shingle, or by bare rocky mountains. Off the straight line of the uppermost irrigating ditch, all is brown as on a high road, while all below is of as bright a green as verdigree, from the beds of alfalfa, a kind of clover. We proceeded to Los Ornos, another mining district, where the principal hill was drilled with holes, like a great ants-nest. The Chilean miners are a peculiar race of men in their habits. Living for weeks together in the most desolate spots where they descend to the villages on feast days, there is no excess of extravagance into which they do not run. They sometimes gain a considerable sum, and then, like sailors with prize money, they try how soon they can contrive to squander it. They drink excessively, buy quantities of clothes, and in a few days return penniless to their miserable abodes, there to work harder than beasts of burden. This thoughtlessness, as with sailors, is evidently the result of a similar manner of life. Where daily food is found them, and they acquire no habits of carefulness, moreover, temptation and the means of yielding to it are placed in their power at the same time. On the other hand, in Cornwall, and some other parts of England, where the system of selling part of the vein is followed, the miners, from being obliged to act and think for themselves, are a singularly intelligent and well-conducted set of men. The dress of the Chilean miner is peculiar and rather picturesque. He wears a very long shirt of some dark-colored bays, with a leather apron, the whole being fastened round his waist by a bright-colored sash. His trousers are very broad, and his small cap of scarlet cloth is made to fit the head closely. We met a party of these miners in full costume, carrying the body of one of their companions to be buried. They marched at a very quick trot, four men supporting the corpse. One set having run as hard as they could for about two hundred yards, were relieved by four others who had previously dashed on a head on horseback. Thus they proceeded, encouraging each other by wild cries, altogether the scene formed a most strange funeral. We continued travelling northward in a zigzag line, sometimes stopping a day to geologize. The country was so thinly inhabited, and the track so obscure, that we often had difficulty in finding our way. On the twelfth I stayed at some mines. The oar, in this case, was not considered particularly good, but from being abundant, it was supposed the mine would sell for about thirty or forty thousand dollars, that is, six thousand or eight thousand pounds sterling. Yet it had been bought by one of the English associations for an ounce of gold, thirty-one and eight. The oar is yellow pyrites, which, as I have already remarked, before the arrival of the English, was not supposed to contain a particle of copper. On a scale of profits nearly as great as in the above instance, piles of cinders abounding with minute globules of metallic copper were purchased, yet with these advantages the mining associations, as is well known, contrived to lose immense sums of money. The folly of the greater number of commissioners and shareholders amounted to infatuation, a thousand pounds per annum given in some cases to entertain the Chilean authorities. Libraries of well-bound geological books, miners brought out for particular metals as tin, which are not found in Chile, contracts to supply the miners with milk in parts where there are no cows, machinery where it could not possibly be used, and a hundred similar arrangements bore witness to our absurdity, and to this day afford amusement to the natives. Yet there can be no doubt that the same capital well employed in these mines would have yielded an immense return, a confidential man of business, a practical miner and assayer, would have been all that was required. Even Head has described the wonderful load which the Aperis, truly beasts of burden, carry up from the deepest mines. I confess I thought the account exaggerated, so that I was glad to take an opportunity of weighing one of the loads which I picked out by hazard. It required considerable exertion on my part when standing directly over it to lift it from the ground. The load was considered underweight when found to be one hundred and ninety-seven pounds. The Aperi had carried this up eighty perpendicular yards, part of the way by a steep passage, but the greater part up notched poles, placed in a zigzag line up the shaft. According to the general regulation the Aperi is not allowed to halt for breath, except the mine is six hundred feet deep. The average load is considered as rather more than two hundred pounds, and I have been assured that one of three hundred pounds, twenty-two stone and a half, by way of a trial, has been brought up from the deepest mine. At this time the Aperis were bringing up the usual load, twelve times in the day, that is two thousand four hundred pounds from eighty yards deep, and they were employed in the intervals in breaking and picking all. These men, excepting from accidents, are healthy and appear cheerful. Their bodies are not very muscular. They rarely eat meat once a week, and never oftener, and then only the hard, dry chad ghee. Although with the knowledge that the labour was voluntary, it was nevertheless quite revolting to see the state in which they reached the mouth of the mine. Their bodies bent forward, leaning with their arms on the steps, their legs bowed, their muscles quivering, the perspiration streaming from their faces over their breasts, their nostrils distended, the corners of their mouth forcibly drawn back, and the expulsion of their breath most laborious. Each time they draw their breath they utter an articulate cry of, ah, ah, which ends in a sound rising from deep in the chest, but shrill, like the note of a fife. After staggering to the pile of all they emptied the garbacho. In two or three seconds recovering their breath they wiped the sweat from their brows, and apparently quite fresh, descended the mine again at a quick pace. This appears to me a wonderful instance of the amount of labour which habit, for it can be nothing else, will enable a man to endure. In the evening, talking with the mayordoma of these mines about the number of foreigners now scattered over the whole country, he told me that, though quite a young man, he remembers when he was a boy at school at Gokimbo, a holiday being given to see the captain of an English ship who was brought to the city to speak to the governor. He believes that nothing would have induced any boy in the school, himself included, to have gone close to the Englishman, so deeply had they been impressed with an idea of the heresy, contamination, and evil to be derived from contact with such a person. To this day they relate the atrocious actions of the Buccaneers, and especially of one man, who took away the figure of the Virgin Mary, and returned the year after for that of St. Joseph, saying it was a pity the lady should not have a husband. I heard also of an old lady who, at a dinner at Gokimbo, remarked how wonderfully strange it was that she should have lived to dine in the same room with an Englishman, for she remembered as a girl that twice at the mere cry of Los Inglises, every soul carrying what valuables they could had taken to the mountains. 14. We reached Gokimbo where we stayed a few days. The town is remarkable for nothing but its extreme quietness. It is said to contain from six thousand to eight thousand inhabitants. On the morning of the seventeenth it rained lightly, the first time this year, for about five hours. The farmers who plant their core near the sea coast, where the atmosphere is most humid, taking advantage of this shower, would break up the ground. After a second they would put the seed in, and if a third shower should fall they would reap a good harvest in the spring. It was interesting to watch the effect of this trifling amount of moisture. Twelve hours afterwards the ground appeared as dry as ever, yet after an interval of ten days all the hills were faintly tinged with green patches, the grass being sparingly scattered in hair-like fibres, a full inch in length. Before this shower every part of the surface was bare as on a high road. In the evening Captain Fitzroy and myself were dining with Mr. Edwards, an English resident well known for his hospitality by all who have visited Kokimbo, when a sharp earthquake happened. I heard the forecoming rumble, but from the screams of the ladies, the running of the servants, and the rush of several of the gentlemen to the doorway, I could not distinguish the motion. Some of the women afterwards were crying with terror, and one gentleman said he should not be able to sleep all night, or if he did it would only be to dream of falling houses. The father of this person had lately lost all his property at Talkawano, and he himself had only just escaped a falling roof at Valparaiso in 1822. He mentioned a curious coincidence which then happened. He was playing at cards when a German, one of the party, got up, and said he would never sit in a room when these countries with the door shut, as owing to his having done so he had nearly lost his life at Gopiapo. Accordingly he opened the door, and no sooner had he done this than he cried out, here it comes again, and the famous shock commenced. The whole party escaped. The danger in an earthquake is not from the time lost in opening the door, but from the chance of its becoming jammed by the movement of the walls. It is impossible to be much surprised at the fear which natives and old residents, though some of them known to be men of great command of mind, so generally experienced during earthquakes. I think, however, this excess of panic may be partly attributed to a want of habit in governing their fear, as it is not a feeling they are ashamed of. Indeed, the natives do not like to see a person indifferent. I heard of two Englishmen who, sleeping in the open air during a smart shock, knowing that there was no danger, did not rise. The natives cried out indignantly, Look at those heretics! They do not even get out of their beds! I spent some days in examining the step-formed terraces of Shingle, first noticed by Captain B. Hall, and believed by Mr. Lyle to have been formed by the sea during the gradual rising of the land. This certainly is the true explanation, for I found numerous shells of existing species on these terraces. Five narrow, gently sloping, fringe-like terraces rise one behind the other, and where best developed are formed of Shingle. They front the bay, and sweep up both sides of the valley. At Gwasko, north of Kokimbo, the phenomenon is displayed on a much grander scale, so as to strike with surprise even some of the inhabitants. The terraces are there much broader, and may be called planes. In some parts there are six of them, but generally only five. They run up the valley for thirty-seven miles from the coast. These step-formed terraces, or fringes, closely resemble those in the valley of Santa Cruz, and, except in being on a smaller scale, those great ones along the whole coastline of Patagonia. They have undoubtedly been formed by the denuding power of the sea during long periods of rest in the gradual elevation of the continent. Shells of many existing species not only lie on the surface of the terraces at Kokimbo, to a height of two hundred and fifty feet, but are embedded in a friable, calcareous rock, which in some places is as much as between twenty and thirty feet in thickness, but is of little extent. These modern beds rest on an ancient tertiary formation containing shells, apparently all extinct. Although I examined so many hundred miles of coast on the Pacific as well as the Atlantic side of the continent, I found no regular strata containing seashells of recent species, accepting at this place, and at a few points northward on the road to Guasco. This fact appears to me highly remarkable, for the explanation generally given by geologists of the absence in any district of stratified fossiliferous deposits of a given period, namely, that the surface then existed as dry land, is not here applicable, for we know from the shells strewed on the surface and embedded in loose sand or mould, that the land for thousands of miles along both coasts has lately been submerged. The explanation no doubt must be sought in the fact that the whole southern part of the continent has been for a long time slowly rising, and therefore that all matter deposited along shore in shallow water must have been soon brought up and slowly exposed to the wearing action of the sea-beach, and it is only in comparatively shallow water that the greater number of marine organic beings can flourish, and in such water it is obviously impossible that strata of any great fitness can accumulate. To show the vast power of the wearing action of sea-beaches, we need only appeal to the great cliffs along the present coasts of Patagonia, and to the escarpments or ancient sea-cliffs at different levels, one above another, on that same line of coast. The old underlying tertiary formation at Gokimbo appears to be of about the same age with several deposits on the coast of Chile, of which that of Navidad is the principal one, and with the great formation of Patagonia. Both at Navidad and in Patagonia there is evidence that since the shells, a list of which has been seen by Professor E. Forbes, there entombed were living, there has been a subsidence of several hundred feet as well as an ensuing elevation. It may naturally be asked how it comes that although no extensive fossiliferous deposits of the recent period nor of any period intermediate between it and the ancient tertiary epoch have been preserved on either side of the continent, yet that at this ancient tertiary epoch sedimentary matter containing fossil remains should have been deposited and preserved at different points in north and south lines over a space of 1,100 miles on the shores of the Pacific, and of at least 1,350 miles on the shores of the Atlantic, and in an east and west line of 700 miles across the widest part of the continent. I believe the explanation is not difficult, and that it is perhaps applicable to nearly analogous facts observed in other quarters of the world. Considering the enormous power of denudation which the sea possesses as shown by numberless facts, it is not probable that a sedimentary deposit, when being upraised, could pass through the ordeal of the beach so as to be preserved in sufficient masses to last to a distant period, without it were originally of wide extent and of considerable thickness. Now it is impossible on a moderately shallow bottom which alone is favourable to most living creatures, that a thick and widely extended covering of sediment could be spread out without the bottom sank down to receive the successive layers. This seems to have actually taken place at about the same period in southern Patagonia and Chile, though these places are a thousand miles apart. Hence, if prolonged movements of approximately contemporaneous subsidence are generally widely extensive, as I am strongly inclined to believe from my examination of the coral reefs of the Great Oceans, or if, confining our view to South America, the subsiding movements have been co-extensive with those of elevation, by which, within the same period of existing shells, the shores of Peru, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia and La Plata have been upraised, then we can see that at the same time, at far distant points, circumstances would have been favourable to the formation of fossiliferous deposits of wide extent and of considerable thickness, and such deposits consequently would have a good chance of resisting the wear and tear of successive beach-lines and of lasting to a future epoch. May 21st. I set out in company with Don José Edwards to the silver mine of Arqueros, and thence up the valley of Coquimbo. Passing through a mountainous country, we reached by night for the mines belonging to Mr. Edwards. I enjoyed my night's rest here from a reason which will not be fully appreciated in England, namely, the absence of fleas. The rooms in Coquimbo swarm with them, but they will not live here at the height of only three or four thousand feet. It can scarcely be the trifling diminution of temperature, but some other cause which destroys these troublesome insects at this place. The mines are now in a bad state, though they formerly yielded about two thousand pounds in weight of silver a year. It has been said that a person with a copper mine will gain, with silver he may gain, but with gold he is sure to lose. This is not true. All the large Chilean fortunes have been made by mines of the more precious metals. A short time since an English physician returned to England from Coquimbo, taking with him the profits of one share of a silver mine, which amounted to about twenty-four thousand pounds sterling. No doubt a copper mine, with care, is a short game, whereas the other is gambling, or rather taking a ticket in a lottery. The owners lose great quantities of rich oars, for no precautions can prevent robberies. I heard of a gentleman laying a bet with another, that one of his men should rob him before his face. The oar, when brought out of the mine, is broken into pieces, and the useless stone thrown on one side. A couple of the miners, who were thus employed, pitched, as if by accident, two fragments away at the same moment, and then cried out for a joke, let us see which rolls furthest. The owner, who was standing by, bet a cigar with his friend on the race. The miner, by this means, watched the very point amongst the rubbish, where the stone lay. In the evening he picked it up, and carried it to his master, showing him a rich mass of silver oar, and saying, this was the stone on which you won a cigar by its rolling so far. May 23. We descended into the fertile valley of Coquimbo, and followed it till we reached an hacienda belonging to a relation of Don José, where we stayed the next day. I then rode one day's journey further, to see what were declared to be some petrified shells and beans, which latter turned out to be small quartz pebbles. We passed through several small villages, and the valley was beautifully cultivated, and the whole scenery very grand. We were here near the main Cordillera, and the surrounding hills were lofty. In all parts of northern Chile, fruit trees produced much more abundantly at a considerable height near the Andes, than in the lower country. The figs and grapes of this district are famous for their excellence, and are cultivated to a great extent. This valley is, perhaps, the most productive one north of Quillota. I believe it contains, including Coquimbo, twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The next day I returned to the hacienda, and thence together with Don José to Coquimbo. June 2. We set out for the valley of Guasco, following the coast road, which was considered rather less desert than the other. Our first day's ride was to a solitary house called Yerba Buena, where there was a pasture for our horses. The shower mentioned as having fallen a fortnight ago only reached about half-way to Guasco. We had, therefore, in the first part of our journey, a most faint tinge of green, which soon faded quite away. Even where brightest it was scarcely sufficient to remind one of the fresh turf and budding flowers of the spring of other countries. While travelling through these deserts, one feels like a prisoner shut up in a gloomy court, who longs to see something green, and to smell a moist atmosphere. June 3. Yerba Buena to Carisal During the first part of the day we crossed a mountainous rocky desert, and afterwards a long, deep sandy plain strewed with broken seashells. There was very little water, and that little saline. The whole country, from the coast to the Cordillera, is an uninhabited desert. I saw traces only of one living animal in abundance, namely the shells of a bulimus, which were collected together in extraordinary numbers on the driest spots. In the spring one humble little plant sends out a few leaves, and on these the snails feed. As they are seen only very early in the morning, when the ground is slightly damp with dew, the guascos believe that they are bred from it. I have observed in other places that extremely dry and sterile districts, where the soil is calcareous, are extraordinarily favourable to land-shells. At Carisal there were a few cottages, some brackish water, and a trace of cultivation, but it was with difficulty that we purchased a little corn and straw for our horses. Fourth, Carisal to Sao Se. We continued to ride over desert plains, tenanted by large herds of Guanaco. We crossed also the valley of Chaneral, which, although the most fertile one between Guasco and Coquimbo, is very narrow, and produces so little pasture that we could not purchase any for our horses. At Sao Se we found a very civil old gentleman, super intendant of a copper-smelting furnace. As in a special favour he allowed me to purchase at a high price an armful of dirty straw, which was all the poor horses had for supper after their long day's journey. Few smelting furnaces are now at work in any part of Chile. It is found more profitable, on account of the extreme scarcity of firewood, and from the Chilean method of reduction being so unskillful, to ship the ore for Swansea. The next day we crossed some mountains to Florina in the valley of Guasco. During each day's ride further northward the vegetation became more and more scanty. Even the great chandelier-like cactus was here replaced by a different and much smaller species. During the winter months, both in northern Chile and in Peru, a uniform bank of clouds hangs at no great height over the Pacific. From the mountains we had a very striking view of this white and brilliant aerial field, which sent arms up the valleys, leaving islands and promontories in the same manner as the sea does in the Chornos archipelago and in Tierra del Fuego. We stayed two days at Florina. In the valley of Guasco there are four small towns. At the mouth there is the port, a spot entirely desert and without any water in the immediate neighbourhood. Five leaks higher up stands Florina, a long, straggling village with decent whitewashed houses. Again ten leaks further up by Yenar is situated, and above this Guasco Alto, a horticultural village famous for its dried fruit. On a clear day, the view up the valley is very fine, the straight opening terminates in the far distant snowy Cordillera. On each side an infinity of crossing lines are blended together in a beautiful haze. The foreground is singular from the number of parallel and step-formed terraces, and the included strip of green valley, with its willow bushes, is contrasted on both hands with the naked hills. That the surrounding country was most barren will be readily believed when it is known that a shower of rain had not fallen during the last thirteen months. The inhabitants heard with the greatest envy of the rain at Gokimbo, from the appearance of the sky they had hopes of equally good fortune, which a fortnight afterwards were realized. I was at Gopiapo at the time, and there the people with equal envy talked of the abundant rain at Guasco. After two or three very dry years, perhaps with not more than one shower during the whole time, a rainy year generally follows, and this does more harm than even the drought. The rivers swell and cover with gravel and sand the narrow strips of ground, which alone are fit for cultivation. The floods also injure the irrigating ditches. Great devastation had thus been caused three years ago. CHAPTER 16 PART 2 NORVEN CHILLE AND PERU JUNE 8. We rode on to Bayenar, which takes its name from Balana, in Ireland, the birthplace of the family of O'Higgins, who under the Spanish government were presidents and generals in Chile. As the rocky mountains on each hand were concealed by clouds, the terrace-like plains gave to the valley an appearance like that of Santa Cruz in Patagonia. After spending one day at Bayenar I set out on the tenth for the upper part of the valley of Gopiapo. We rode all day over an uninteresting country. I am tired of repeating the epithets barren and sterile. These words, however, as commonly used, are comparative. I have always applied them to the plains of Patagonia, which can boast of spiny bushes and some tufts of grass, and this is absolute fertility, as compared with northern Chile. Here again there are not many spaces of two hundred yards square where some little bush, cactus, or lichen may not be discovered by careful examination, and in the soil seeds lie dormant ready to spring up during the first rainy winter. In Peru real deserts occur over wide tracts of country. In the evening we arrived at a valley in which the bed of the streamlet was damp. Coming it up we came to tolerably good water. During the night the stream, from not being evaporated and absorbed so quickly, flows a league lower than during the day. Sticks were plentiful for firewood, so that it was a good place to bivouac for us. But for the poor animals there was not a mouthful to eat. June 11th. We rode without stopping for twelve hours till we reached an old smelting furnace where there was water in firewood, but our horses again had nothing to eat, being shut up in an old courtyard. The line of road was hilly, and the distant views interesting from the varied colors of the bare mountains. It was almost a pity to see the sun shining constantly over so useless a country. Such splendid weather ought to have brightened fields and pretty gardens. The next day we reached the valley of Copiapo. I was heartily glad of it, for the whole journey was a continued source of anxiety. It was most disagreeable to hear, whilst eating our own suppers, our horses gnawing the posts to which they were tied, and to have no means of relieving their hunger. To all appearance, however, the animals were quite fresh, and no one could have told that they had eaten nothing for the last fifty-five hours. I had a letter of introduction to Mr. Bingley, who received me very kindly at the Hacienda of Potrero Seco. This estate is between twenty and thirty miles long, but very narrow, being generally only two fields wide, one on each side of the river. In some parts the estate is of no width, that is to say, the land cannot be irrigated, and therefore is valueless, like the surrounding rocky desert. The small quantity of cultivated land in the whole line of valley does not so much depend on inequalities of level and consequent unfitness for irrigation, as on the small supply of water. The river this year was remarkably full. Somewhere high up in the valley, it reached to the horse's belly, and was about fifteen yards wide and rapid. Lower down it becomes smaller and smaller, and it generally quite lost, as happened during one period of thirty years, so that not a drop entered the sea. The inhabitants watch a storm over the Gordillera with great interest, as one good fall of snow provides them with water for the ensuing year. This is of infinitely more consequence than rain in the lower country. Rain as often as it falls, which is about once in every two or three years, is a great advantage, because the cattle and mules can, for some time afterwards, find a little pasture in the mountains. But without snow on the Andes, desolation extends throughout the valley. It is on record that three times nearly all the inhabitants have been obliged to emigrate to the south. This year there was plenty of water, and every man irrigated his ground as much as he chose. But it has frequently been necessary to post soldiers at the sluices, to see that each estate took only its proper allowance during so many hours in the week. The valley is said to contain twelve thousand souls, but its produce is sufficient only for three months in the year, the rest of the supply being drawn from Valparaiso in the south. Before the discovery of the famous silver mines of Canuncio, Gopiapo was in a rapid state of decay, but now it is in a very thriving condition, and the town, which was completely overthrown by an earthquake, has been rebuilt. The valley of Gopiapo, forming a mere ribbon of green in a desert, runs in a very southerly direction, so that it is of considerable length to its source in the Cordillera. The valleys of Guasco and Gopiapo may both be considered as long, narrow islands, separated from the rest of Chile by deserts of rock instead of by salt water. Northward of these there is one other very miserable valley, called Paposo, which contains about two hundred souls, and then there extends the real desert of Atacama, a barrier far worse than the most turbulent ocean. After staying a few days at Potrero Seco, I proceeded up the valley to the house of Dom Benito Cruz, to whom I had a letter of introduction. I found him most hospitable. Indeed it is impossible to bear too strong testimony to the kindness with which travelers are received in almost every part of South America. The next day I hired some mules to take me by the ravine of Holquera into the central Cordillera. On the second night the weather seemed to foretell a storm of snow or rain, and whilst lying in our beds we felt a trifling shock of an earthquake. The connection between earthquakes and the weather has often been disputed. It appears to me to be a point of great interest which is little understood. Humboldt has remarked in one part of the personal narrative that it would be difficult for any person who had long resided in new Andalusia or in lower Peru. To deny that there exists some connection between these phenomena. In another part, however, he seems to think the connection fanciful. At Guayaquil it is said that a heavy shower in the dry season is invariably followed by an earthquake. In northern Chile, from the extreme infrequency of rain, or even of weather foreboding rain, the probability of accidental coincidences becomes very small, yet the inhabitants are here most firmly convinced of some connection between the state of the atmosphere and of the trembling of the ground. I was much struck by this when mentioning to some people at Copiapo that there had been a sharp shock at Coquimbo. They immediately cried out, How fortunate! There will be plenty of pasture there this year. To their minds an earthquake foretold rain as surely as rain foretold abundant pasture. Certainly it did so happen that on the very day of the earthquake that shower of rain fell, which I have described as in ten days time producing a thin sprinkling of grass. But other times rain has followed earthquakes in a period of the year when it is a far greater prodigy than the earthquake itself. This happened after the shock of November 1822 and again in 1829 at Valparaiso. Also after that of September 1833 at Dacna. A person must be somewhat habituated to the climate of these countries to perceive the extreme improbability of rain falling at such seasons, except as a consequence of some law quite unconnected with the ordinary course of the weather. In the cases of great volcanic eruptions, as that of Gossegina, where torrents of rain fell at a time of the year most unusual for it, and almost unprecedented in Central America, it is not difficult to understand that the volumes of vapor and clouds of ashes might have disturbed the atmospheric equilibrium. Humboldt extends this view to the case of earthquakes unaccompanied by eruptions, but I can hardly conceive it possible that the small quantity of air-form fluids which then escape from the fished ground can produce such remarkable effects. There appears much probability in the view first proposed by Mr. P. Scrope that when the barometer is low, and when rain might naturally be expected to fall, the diminished pressure of the atmosphere over a wide extent of the country might well determine the precise day on which the earth, already stretched to the utmost by the subterranean forces, should yield, crack, and consequently tremble. It is, however, doubtful how far this idea will explain the circumstances of torrents of rain falling in the dry season during several days after an earthquake unaccompanied by an eruption. Such cases seem to bespeak some more intimate connection between the atmospheric and subterranean regions. Finding little of interest in this part of the ravine, we retraced our steps to the house of Dom Benito, where I stayed two days collecting fossil shells and wood. Great prostrate-silicified trunks of trees embedded in a conglomerate were extraordinarily numerous. I measured one, which was fifteen feet in circumference. How surprising it is that every atom of the woody matter in this great cylinder should have been removed and replaced by silics so perfectly, that each vessel and pore is preserved. These trees flourished at about the period of our lower chalk. They all belonged to the fur tribe. It was amusing to hear the inhabitants discussing the nature of the fossil shells which I collected, almost in the same terms as were used a century ago in Europe, namely whether or not they had been thus borne by nature. My geological examination of the country generally created a good deal of surprise amongst the Chilean. It was long before they could be convinced that I was not hunting for mines. This was sometimes troublesome. I found the most ready way of explaining my employment was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanoes, why some springs were hot and others cold, why there were mountains in Chile and not a hill in La Plata. These bare questions at once satisfied in silence the greater number. Some, however, like a few in England who are a century behind hand, thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious, and that it was quite sufficient that God had thus made the mountains. An order had recently been issued that all stray dogs should be killed, and we saw many lying dead on the road. A great number had lately gone mad, and several men had been bitten and had died in consequence. On several occasions hydrophobia has prevailed in this valley. It is remarkable thus to find so strange and dreadful a disease appearing time after time in the same isolated spot. It has been remarked that certain villages in England are in like manner much more subject to this visitation than others. Dr. Unanue states that hydrophobia was first known in South America in 1803. This statement is corroborated by Asara and Ulloa, having never heard of it in their time. Dr. Unanue says that it broke out in Central America and slowly travelled southward. It reached Aliquipa in 1807, and it is said that some men there who had not been bitten were affected, as were some negroes, who had eaten a bullock which had died of hydrophobia. At Ica forty-two people thus miserably perished. The disease came on between twelve and ninety days after the bite, and in those cases where it did come on, death ensued invariably within five days. After 1808 a long interval ensued without any cases. On inquiry I did not hear of hydrophobia in Van Diemen's land, or in Australia, and Birchell says that during the five days that he was at the Cape of Good Hope he never heard of an instance of it. Webster asserts that at the Azores hydrophobia has never occurred, and the same assertion has been made with respect to Mauritius and St. Helena. In so strange a disease some information might possibly be gained by considering the circumstances under which it originates in distant climes, for it is improbable that a dog already bitten should have been brought to these distant countries. At night a stranger arrived at the house of Don Benito and asked permission to sleep there. He said he had been wondering about the mountains for seventeen days, having lost his way. He started from Guasco, and being accustomed to travelling in the Cordillera did not expect any difficulty in following the track to Copiapo, but he soon became involved in a labyrinth of mountains whence he could not escape. Some of his mules had fallen over precipices, and he had been in great distress. His chief difficulty arose from not knowing where to find water in the lower country, so that he was obliged to keep bordering the central ranges. We returned down the valley, and on the twenty-second reached the town of Copiapo. The lower part of the valley is broad, forming a fine plain like that of Quillota. The town covers a considerable space of ground, each house possessing a garden, but it is an uncomfortable place, and the dwellings are poorly furnished. Everyone seems bent on the one subject of making money, and then migrating as quickly as possible. All the inhabitants are more or less directly concerned with the mines, and mines and oars are the sole subjects of conversation. Necessaries of all sorts are extremely dear, as the distance from the town to the port is eighteen weeks, and the land carriage very expensive. A fowl costs five or six shillings, meat is nearly as dear as an England, firewood, or rather sticks, are brought on donkeys from a distance of two and three days' journey within the Corvillera, and pasture-ish for animals is a shilling a day. All this for South America is wonderfully exorbitant. June 26. I hired a guide and eight mules to take me into the Corvillera by a different line from my last excursion. As the country was utterly desert, we took a cargo and a half of barley mixed with chopped straw. About two leaks above the town, a broad valley called the Vespoblado, or uninhabited, branches off from that one by which we had arrived. Although a valley of the grandest dimensions and leading to a pass across the Corvillera, yet it is completely dry, excepting perhaps for a few days during some very rainy winter. The sides of the crumbling mountains were furrowed by scarcely any ravines, and the bottom of the main valley, filled with shingle, was smooth and nearly level. No considerable torrent could ever have flowed down this bed of shingle, for if it had, a great cliff-bounded channel, as in all southern valleys, would assuredly have been formed. I feel little doubt that this valley, as well as those mentioned by travellers in Peru, were left in the state we now see them by the waves of the sea as the water-land slowly rose. I observed in one place where the Vespoblado was joined by a ravine, which in almost any other chain would have been called a grand valley, that its bed, though composed merely of sand and gravel, was higher than that of its tributary. A mere rivulet of water, in the course of an hour, would have cut a channel for itself, but it was evident that ages had passed away, and no such rivulet had drained this great tributary. It was curious to behold the machinery, if such a term may be used, for the drainage, all with the last trifling exception perfect, yet without any signs of action. Everyone must have remarked how mud-banks, left by retiring tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale, and there we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent rose during the secular retirement of the ocean, instead of during the ebbing and flowing of the tides. If a shower of rain falls on a mud-bank, when left dry, it deepens the already formed shallow lines of excavation, and so it is but the rain of successive centuries on the bank of rock and soil which we call a continent. We rode on after it was dark, till we reached a side ravine with a small well called Aguamarga. The water deserved its name, for besides being saline, it was most offensively putrid and bitter, so that we could not force ourselves to drink either tea or mate. I suppose the distance from the river of Copiapo to this spot was at least twenty-five or thirty English miles. In the whole space there was not a single drop of water, the country deserving the name of desert in the strictest sense. Yet about half way we passed some old Indian ruins near Punta Gorda. I noticed also in front of some of the valleys, which branch off from the despoblado, two piles of stones placed a little way apart, and erected so as to point up the mouths of these small valleys. My companions knew nothing about them, and only answered my queries by their imperturbable Quinsare. I observed Indian ruins in several parts of the Gordillera, the most perfect which I saw, were the ruinas de tambillos, in the use by Yatapas. Small square rooms were there huddled together in separate groups, some of the doorways yet standing. They were formed by a cross-slab of stone only about three feet high. Ulloa has remarked on the lowness of the doors in the ancient Peruvian dwellings. These houses, when perfect, must have been capable of containing a considerable number of persons. Tradition says that they were used as halting-places for the Incas when they crossed the mountains. Traces of Indian habitations have been discovered in many other parts, where it does not appear probable that they were used as mere resting-places, but yet where the land is as utterly unfit for any kind of cultivation, as it is near the tambillos, or at the Incas bridge, or in the Portillo Pass, at all which places I saw ruins. In the ravine of Jajuel, near Aconcawa, where there is no pass, I heard of remains of houses situated at a great height where it is extremely cold and sterile. At first I imagined that these buildings had been places of refuge built by the Indians on the first arrival of the Spaniards, but I have since been inclined to speculate on the probability of a small change of climate. In this northern part of Chile, within the Cordillera, old Indian houses are said to be especially numerous, by digging amongst the ruins bits of woollen articles, instruments of precious metals, and heads of Indian corn, are not unfrequently discovered. An arrowhead made of agate, and of precisely the same form with those now used in Tierra del Fuego was given me. I am aware that the Peruvian Indians now frequently inhabit most lofty and bleak situations, but at Gopiapo I was assured by men who had spent their lives in travelling through the Andes, that there were very many, muchisimas, buildings at height so great as almost to border on the perpetual snow, and in parts where there exist no passes, and where the land produces absolutely nothing, and what is still more extraordinary, where there is no water. Nevertheless it is the opinion of the people of the country, although they are much puzzled by the circumstance, that from the appearance of the houses the Indians must have used them as places of residence. In this valley, at Punta Gorda, the remains consisted of seven or eight square little rooms, which were of a similar form with those at Dambillos, but built chiefly of mud, which the present inhabitants cannot, either here or according to Ulloa in Peru, imitate in durability. They were situated in the most conspicuous and defenceless position, at the bottom of the flat, broad valley. There was no water nearer than three or four leagues, and that only in very small quantity and bad. The soil was absolutely sterile. I looked in vain even for a lichen adhering to the rocks. At the present day, with the advantage of beasts of burden, a mine, unless it were very rich, could scarcely be worked here with profit, yet the Indians formally chose it as a place of residence. If at the present time two or three showers of rain were to fall annually instead of one, as now is the case during as many years, a small rill of water would probably be formed in this great valley, and then, by irrigation, which was formally so well understood by the Indians, the soil would easily be rendered sufficiently productive to support a few families. I have convincing proofs that this part of the continent of South America has been elevated near the coast, at least from four hundred to five hundred, and in some parts from one thousand to one thousand three hundred feet, since the epoch of existing shells, and further inland the rise possibly may have been greater. As the peculiarly arid character of the climate is evidently a consequence of the height of the Cordillera, we may feel almost sure that before the later elevations the atmosphere could not have been so completely drained of its moisture as it is now, and as the rise has been gradual, so would have been the changing climate. On this notion of a change of climate, since the buildings were inhabited, the ruins must be of extreme antiquity, but I do not think their preservation under the Chilean climate any great difficulty. We must also admit on this notion, and this perhaps is a greater difficulty, that man has inhabited South America for an immensely long period, in as much as any change of climate affected by the elevation of the land must have been extremely gradual. At Valparaiso, within the last two hundred and twenty years, the rise has been somewhat less than nineteen feet. At Lima, a sea-beach has certainly been upheaved from eighty to ninety feet within the Indo-human period, but such small elevations could have had little power in deflecting the moisture bringing atmospheric currents. Dr. Lund, however, found human skeletons in the caves of Brazil, the appearance of which induced him to believe that the Indian race has existed during a vast lapse of time in South America. When at Lima, I conversed on these subjects with Mr. Gill, a civil engineer, who had seen much of the interior country. Footnote. Temple in his travels through Upper Peru, or Bolivia, in going from Potosí to Orudo says, I saw many Indian villages or dwellings in ruins, up even to the very tops of the mountains, attesting a former population where now all is desolate. He makes similar remarks in another place, but I cannot tell whether this desolation has been caused by a want of population or by an altered condition of the land. End footnote. He told me that a conjecture of a change of climate had sometimes crossed his mind, but that he thought that the greater portion of land, now incapable of cultivation, but covered with Indian ruins, had been reduced to this state by the water conduits, which the Indians formally constructed on so wonderful a scale, having been injured by neglect and by subterranean movements. I may hear mention that the Peruvians actually carried their irrigating streams in tunnels through hills of solid rock. Mr. Gill told me he had been employed professionally to examine one. He found the passage low, narrow, crooked, and not of uniform breadth, but of very considerable length. Is it not most wonderful that men should have attempted such operations without the use of iron or gunpowder? Mr. Gill also mentioned to me a most interesting, and as far as I am aware, quite unparalleled case of a subterranean disturbance having changed the drainage of a country. Travelling from Ghazma to Varas, not very far distant from Lima, he found a plain covered with ruins and marks of ancient cultivation, but now quite barren. Near it was the dry course of a considerable river, whence the water for irrigation had formally been conducted. There was nothing in the appearance of the water-course to indicate that the river had not flowed there a few years previously. In some parts, beds of sand and gravel were spread out. In others, the solid rock had been worn into a broad channel, which in one spot was about forty yards in breadth and eight feet deep. It is self-evident that a person following up the course of a stream will always ascend at a greater or less inclination. Mr. Gill, therefore, was much astonished when walking up the bed of this ancient river to find himself suddenly going downhill. He imagined that the downward slope had a fall of about forty or fifty feet perpendicular. We here have unequivocal evidence that a ridge had been uplifted right across the old bed of a stream. From the moment the river-course was thus arched, the water must necessarily have been thrown back and a new channel formed. From that moment also the neighbouring plain must have lost its fertilising stream and become a desert. June 27th. We set out early in the morning, and by mid-day reached the ravine of Bipote, where there is a tiny rill of water with a little vegetation and even a few alga-roba trees, a kind of mimosa. From having firewood a smelting furnace had formerly been built here. We found a solitary man in charge of it whose sole employment was hunting wanakos. At night it froze sharply, but having plenty of wood for our fire we kept ourselves warm. 28th. We continued gradually ascending, and the valley now changed into a ravine. During the day we saw several wanakos, and the track of the closely allied species, the vicuña. This latter animal is preeminently alpine in its habits. Its seldom descends much below the limit of perpetual snow, and therefore haunts even a more lofty and sterile situation than the wanako. The only other animal which we saw in any number was a small fox. I suppose this animal preys on the mice and other small rodents, which, as long as there is the least vegetation, subsists in considerable numbers in very desert places. In Patagonia even on the borders of the Salinas where a drop of fresh water can never be found, except in dew, these little animals swarm. Next to lizards mice appear to be able to support existence on the smallest and driest portions of the earth, even on islets in the midst of great oceans. The scene on all sides showed desolation, brightened and made palpable by a clear unclouded sky. For a time such scenery is sublime, but this feeling cannot last, and then it becomes uninteresting. We bevel act at the foot of the Primera Linea, or the first line of the partition of waters. The streams, however, on the east side do not flow into the Atlantic, but into an elevated district in the middle of which there is a large saline or salt lake, thus forming a little Caspian sea at the height, perhaps of ten thousand feet. While we slept, there were some considerable patches of snow, but they do not remain throughout the year. The winds in these lofty regions obey very regular laws. Every day a fresh breeze blows up the valley, and at night an hour or two after sunset the air from the cold regions above descends us through a funnel. This night it blew a gale of wind, and the temperature must have been considerably below the freezing point, for water in a vessel soon became a block of ice. No clothes seemed to oppose any obstacle to the air. I suffered very much from the cold, so that I could not sleep, and in the morning rose with my body quite dull and benumbed. In the Cordillera further southward people lose their lives from snow storms. Here it sometimes happens from another course. My guide, when a boy of fourteen years old, was passing the Cordillera with a party in the month of May, and while in the central parts a furious gale of wind arose, so that the men could hardly cling on their mules, and stones were flying along the ground. The day was cloudless and not a speck of snow fell, but the temperature was low. It is probable that the thermometer could not have stood very many degrees below the freezing point, but the effect on their bodies, ill-protected by clothing, must have been in proportion to the rapidity of the current of cold air. The gale lasted for more than a day. The men began to lose their strength, and the mules would not move onwards. My guide's brother tried to return, but he perished, and his body was found two years afterwards, lying by the side of his mule near the road, with the bridle still in his hand. Two other men in the party lost their fingers and toes, and out of two hundred mules and thirty cows, only fourteen mules escaped alive. Many years ago the whole of a large party are supposed to have perished from similar cause, but their bodies to this day have never been discovered. The union of a cloudless sky, low temperature, and a furious gale of wind, must be, I should think, in all parts of the world, an unusual occurrence. June 29th. We gladly travelled down the valley to our former night's lodging, and thence to near the Agua Marga. On July 1st we reached the valley of Copiapo. The smell of the fresh clover was quite delightful, after the scentless air of the dry sterile despoilado. While staying in the town, I heard an account from several of the inhabitants of a hill in the neighbourhood which they called El Bramador, the Rora or Belloa. I did not at the time pay sufficient attention to the account, but as far as I understood the hill was covered by sand, and the noise was produced only when people, by ascending it, put the sand in motion. The same circumstances are described in detail on the authority of Zitzen and Ehrenberg, as the cause of the sounds which have been heard by many travellers on Mount Sinai near the Red Sea. One person with whom I conversed had himself heard the noise. He described it as very surprising, and he distinctly stated that, although he could not understand how it was caused, yet it was necessary to set the sand rolling down the aclivity. A horse walking over coarse, dry sand causes a peculiar chirping noise from the friction of the particles, a circumstance which I several times noticed on the coast of Brazil. Three days afterwards I heard of the Beagle's arrival at the port, distant eighteen leagues from the town. There is very little land cultivated down the valley. Its wide expanse supports a wretched, wiry grass which even the donkeys can hardly eat. This porno of the vegetation is owing to the quantity of saline matter with which the soil is impregnated. The port consists of an assemblage of miserable little hovels situated at the foot of a sterile plain. At present, as the river contains water enough to reach the sea, the inhabitants enjoy the advantage of having fresh water within a mile and a half. On the beach there were large piles of merchandise, and the little place had an air of activity. In the evening I gave my adios with a hearty goodwill to my companion Mariano Gonzales, with whom I had ridden so many leagues in Chile. The next morning the Beagle sailed for Iquique. July 12th. We anchored in the Port of Iquique, in latitude twenty degrees twelve minutes on the coast of Peru. The town contains about a thousand inhabitants and stands on a little plain of sand at the foot of a great wall of rock, two thousand feet in height, here forming the coast. The whole is utterly desert. A light shower of rain falls only once in very many years, and the ravines consequently are filled with detritus and the mountainsides covered by piles of fine white sand, even to a height of a thousand feet. During this season of the year a heavy bank of clouds stretched over the ocean. Seldom rises above the wall of rocks on the coast. The aspect of the place was most gloomy. The little port, with its few vessels and small group of wretched houses, seemed overwhelmed and out of all proportion with the rest of the scene. The inhabitants live like persons on board a ship. Every necessary comes from a distance. Water is brought in boats from Pisagua, about forty miles northward, and is sold at the rate of nine reales, four shillings, sixpence, and eighteen-gallon casque. I bought a wine bottle full for threepence. In like manner, firewood, and, of course, every article of food, is imported. Very few animals can be maintained in such a place. On the ensuing morning I hired with difficulty, at the price of four pounds sterling, two mules and a guide to take me to the nitrate of soda-works. These are at present the support of Inquiquet. This salt was first exported in 1830. In one year, an amount in value of one hundred thousand pounds sterling was sent to France in England. It is principally used as a manure, and in the manufacture of nitric acid. Owing to its delicousant property it will not serve for gunpowder. Formerly there were two exceedingly rich silver mines in this neighbourhood, but their produce is now very small. Our arrival in the offing caused some little apprehension. Beroux was in a state of anarchy, and each party having demanded a contribution, the poor town of Inquiquet was in tribulation, thinking the evil hour was come. The people had also their domestic troubles. A short time before, three French carpenters had broken open during the same night, the two churches, and stolen all the plate. One of the robbers, however, subsequently confessed, and the plate was recovered. The convicts were sent to Arequipa, which, though the capital of this province, is two hundred leagues distant. The government there thought it a pity to punish such useful workmen, who could make all sorts of furniture, and accordingly liberated them. Things being in this state, the churches were again broken open, but this time the plate was not recovered. The inhabitants became dreadfully enraged, and declaring that none but heretics would thus eat God Almighty, proceeded to torture some Englishmen with the intention of afterwards shooting them. At last the authorities interfered, and peace was established. Thirteenth. In the morning I started for the Saltpeter Works, a distance of fourteen leagues. Having ascended the steep coast mountains by a zigzag sandy track, we soon came in view of the mines of Wanda Chaya and St. Rosa. These two small villages are placed at the very mouths of the mines, and being perched up on hills, they had a still more unnatural and desolate appearance than the town of Inquiquet. We did not reach the Saltpeter Works till after sunset, having ridden all day across an undulating country, a complete and utter desert. The road was strewed with the bones and dried skins of many beasts of burden which had perished on it from fatigue. Accepting the Vulture Aura, which preys on the carcasses, I saw neither bird, quadruped, reptile nor insect. On the coast mountains, at the height of about two thousand feet, where during this season the clouds generally hang, a very few cacti were growing in the clefts of rock, and the loose sand was strewed over with a lichen which lies on the surface quite unattached. This plant belongs to the genus Cladonia, and somewhat resembles the reindeer lichen. In some parts it was insufficient quantity to tinge the sand, as seen from a distance, of a pale yellowish colour. Further inland, during the whole ride of fourteen leagues, I saw only one other vegetable production, and that was a most minute yellow lichen growing on the bones of the dead mules. This was the first true desert which I had seen. The effect on me was not impressive, but I believe this was owing to my having become gradually accustomed to such scenes, as I rode northward from Valparaiso through Coquimbo to Copiapo. The appearance of the country was remarkable, from being covered by a thick crust of common salt, and of a stratified saliferous aluvium which seems to have been deposited as the land slowly rose above the level of the sea. The salt is white, very hard and compact. It occurs in water, worn nodules projecting from the agglutinated sand, and is associated with much gypsum. The appearance of this superficial mass very closely resembled that of a country after snow, before the last dirty patches are thawed. The existence of this crust, of a soluble substance over the whole face of the country, shows how extraordinarily dry the climate must have been for a long period. At night I slept at the house of the owner of one of the salt-peeter mines. The country is here as unproductive as near the coast, but water, having rather a bitter and brackish taste, can be procured by digging wells. The well at this house was thirty-six yards deep. As scarcely any rain falls, it is evident the water is not thus derived. Indeed, if it were, it could not fail to be as salt as brine, for the whole surrounding country is encrusted with various saline substances. We must therefore conclude that it percolates underground from the Cordillera, though distant many leagues. In that direction there are a few small villages where the inhabitants, having more water, are unable to irrigate a little land and raise hay, on which the mules and asses employed in carrying the salt-peeter are fed. The nitrate of soda was now selling at the ship's side at fourteen shillings per hundred pounds. The chief expense is its transport to the sea-coast. The mine consists of a hard stratum, between two and three feet thick, of the nitrate mingled with a little of the sulfate of soda, and a good deal of common salt. It lies close beneath the surface, and follows for a length of one hundred and fifty miles, the margin of a grand basin or plain. This, from its outline, manifestly must once have been a lake, or, more probably, an inland arm of the sea, as may be inferred from the presence of iodic salts in the saline stratum. The surface of the plain is three thousand three hundred feet above the Pacific. Nineteenth. We anchored in the bay of Gayao, the sea-port of Lima, the capital of Peru. We stayed there six weeks, but from the troubled state of public affairs, I saw very little of the country. During our whole visit the climate was far from being so delightful as it is generally represented. A dull, heavy bank of clouds constantly hung over the land, so that during the first sixteen days I had only one view of the Cordillera behind Lima. These mountains, seen in stages, one above the other, through openings in the clouds, had a very grand appearance. It has almost become a proverb that rain never falls in the lower part of Peru. Yet this can hardly be considered correct, for during almost every day of our visit there was a thick, drizzling mist which was sufficient to make the streets muddy, and one's clothes damp. This, the people are pleased to call Peruvian due. That much rain does not fall is very certain, for the houses are covered only with flat roofs made of hardened mud, and on the mole shiploads of wheat were piled up, being thus left for weeks together without any shelter. I cannot say I liked the very little I saw of Peru. In summer, however, it is said that the climate is much pleasanter. In all seasons, both inhabitants and foreigners suffer from severe attacks of ague. This disease is common on the whole coast of Peru, but is unknown in the interior. The attacks of illness which arise from miasma never fail to appear most mysterious. So difficult is it to judge from the aspect of a country, whether or not it is healthy, that if a person had been told to choose within the tropics a situation appearing favourable for health, very probably he would have named this coast. The plain round the outskirts of Gayao is sparingly covered with a coarse grass, and in some parts there are a few stagnant, though very small, pools of water. The miasma, in all probability, arises from these. For the town of Areca was similarly circumcised, and its healthiness was much improved by the drainage of some little pools. Miasma is not always produced by a luxuriant vegetation with an ardent climate, for many parts of Brazil, even where there are marshes and a rank vegetation, are much more healthy than this sterile coast of Peru. The densest forests in a temperate climate, as in Chile, do not seem in the slightest degree to affect the healthy condition of the atmosphere. The island of Sainte Jago, at the Gap de Verre, offers another strongly marked instance of a country which any one would have expected to find most healthy, being very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation which directly withers away and dries up. At this period the air appears to become quite poisonous, both natives and foreigners often being affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos archipelago in the Pacific, with a similar soil and periodically subject to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy. Humboldt has observed that, under the torrid zone, the smallest marshes are the most dangerous, being surrounded, as at Veracruz and Cartagena, with an arid and sandy soil which raises the temperature of the ambient air. On the coast of Peru, however, the temperature is not hot to any excessive degree, and perhaps in consequence, the intermittent fevers are not of the most malignant order. In all unhealthy countries, the greatest risk is run by sleeping on shore. Is this owing to the state of the body during sleep, or to a greater abundance of miasma at such times? It appears certain that those who stay on board a vessel, though anchored at only a short distance from the coast, generally suffer less than those actually on shore. On the other hand, I have heard of one remarkable case where a fever broke out among the crew of a man of war some hundred miles off the coast of Africa, and at the same time one of those fearful periods of death commenced at Sierra Leone. Footnote. A similar interesting case is recorded in the Madras Medical Quarterly Journal, 1839, page 340. Dr. Ferguson, in his admirable paper, seen ninth volume of Edinburgh Royal Transactions, shows clearly that the poison is generated in the drying process, and hence that dry, hot countries are often the most unhealthy. End footnote. No state in South America, since the Declaration of Independence, has suffered more from anarchy than Peru. At the time of our visit, there were four chiefs in arms contending for supremacy in the government. If one succeeded in becoming for a time very powerful, the others coalesced against him, but no sooner were they victorious than they were again hostile to each other. The other day, at the anniversary of the independence, high mass was performed, the president partaking of the sacrament. During the Tadeum Laudamus, instead of each regiment displaying the Peruvian flag, a black one with death's head was unfurled. Imagine a government under which such a scene could be ordered on such an occasion to be typical of their determination of fighting to death. This state of affairs happened at a time very unfortunately for me, as I was precluded from taking any excursions much beyond the limits of the town. The barren island of St. Lorenzo, which forms the harbour, was nearly the only place where one could walk securely. The upper part, which is upwards of one thousand feet in height, during this season of the year, winter, comes within the lower limit of the clouds, and in consequence an abundant cryptogrammic vegetation and a few flowers cover the summit. On the hills near Lima, at a height but little greater, the ground is carpeted with moss, and beds of beautiful yellow lilies called amanques, indicates a very much greater degree of humidity than at a corresponding height at Iquique. Proceeding northward of Lima, the climate becomes damper, till on the banks of the Guayaquil, nearly under the equator, we find the most luxuriant forests. The change, however, from the sterile coast of Peru to that fertile land, is described as taking place rather abruptly in the latitude of Cape Blanco, two degrees south of Guayaquil. Callao is a filthy ill-built small seaport. The inhabitants, both here and at Lima, present every imaginable shade of mixture between European, Negro, and Indian blood. They appear a depraved drunken set of people. The atmosphere is loaded with foul smells, and that peculiar one, which may be perceived in almost every town within the tropics, was here very strong. The fortress, which withstood Lord Cochrane's long siege, has an imposing appearance, but the President, during our stay, sold the brass guns and proceeded to dismantle parts of it. The reason assigned was that he had not an officer to whom he could trust so important a charge. He himself had good reason for thinking so, as he had obtained the Presidentship by rebelling while in charge of this same fortress. After we left South America, he paid the penalty in the usual manner by being conquered, taken prisoner, and shot. Lima stands on a plain in a valley formed during the gradual retreat of the sea. It is seven miles from Callao, and is elevated five hundred feet above it. But from the slope being very gradual, the road appears absolutely level, so that when at Lima it is difficult to believe one has ascended even one hundred feet. Humboldt has remarked on this singularly deceptive case. Steep barren hills rise like islands from the plain, which is divided by straight mud walls into large green fields. In these scarcely a tree grows, accepting a few willows, and an occasional clump of bananas and of oranges. The city of Lima is now in a wretched state of decay. The streets are nearly unpaved, and heaps of filth are piled up in all directions, where the black gallinasos, tame as poultry, pick up bits of carrion. The houses have generally an upper story, built on account of the earthquakes of plastered woodwork, but some of the old ones, which are now used by several families, are immensely large and would rival in suites of apartments the most magnificent in any place. Lima, the city of the kings, must formally have been a splendid town. The extraordinary number of churches gives it, even at the present day, a peculiar and striking character, especially when viewed from a short distance. One day I went out with some merchants to hunt in the immediate vicinity of the city. Our sport was very poor, but I had an opportunity of seeing the ruins of one of the ancient Indian villages, with its mound like a natural hill in the centre. The remains of houses and closures, irrigating streams and burial-mounds, scattered over this plain, cannot fail to give one a high idea of the condition and number of the ancient population. When their earthenware, woollen clothes, utensils of elegant form scout out of the hardest rocks, tools of copper, ornaments of precious stones, palaces, and hydraulic works are considered, it is impossible not to respect the considerable advance made by them in the arts of civilisation. The burial-mounds, called Huacas, are really stupendous, although in some places they appear to be natural hills encased and modelled. There is also another and very different class of ruins which possesses some interest, namely those of Old Callao, overwhelmed by the great earthquake of 1746, and its accompanying wave. The destruction must have been more complete even than at Dalcauano. Quantities of shingle almost conceal the foundations of the walls, and vast masses of brickwork appear to have been whirled about like pebbles by the retiring waves. It has been stated that the land subsided during this memorable shock. I could not discover any proof of this, yet it seems far from improbable. For the form of the coast must certainly have undergone some change since the foundation of the old town, as no people in their senses would willingly have chosen for their building-place the narrow spit of shingle on which the ruins now stand. Since our voyage, Monsieur Choudi has come to the conclusion, by the comparison of old and modern maps, that the coast both north and south of Lima has certainly subsided. On the island of San Lorenzo there are very satisfactory proofs of elevation within a recent period. This, of course, is not opposed to the belief of a small sinking of the ground having subsequently taken place. The side of this island, fronting the Bay of Gayao, is worn into three obscured terraces, the lower one of which is covered by a bed a mile in length, almost wholly composed of shells of eighteen species now living in the adjoining sea. The height of this bed is eighty-five feet. Many of the shells are deeply corroded and have a much older and more decayed appearance than those at the height of five hundred or six hundred feet on the coast of Chile. These shells are associated with much common salt, a little sulfate of lime, both probably left by the evaporation of the spray as the land slowly rose, together with sulfate of soda and myriad of lime. They rest on fragments of the underlying sandstone and are covered by a few inches thick of detritus. The shells higher up on this terrace could be traced scaling off in flakes and falling into an impalpable powder, and on an upper terrace, at the height of one hundred and seventy feet, and likewise at some considerably higher points, I found a layer of saline powder of exactly similar appearance and lying in the same relative position. I have no doubt that this upper layer originally existed as a bed of shells, like that on the eighty-five feet ledge, but it does not now contain even a trace of organic structure. The powder has been analyzed for me by Mr. T. Reeks. It consists of sulfates and myriates, both of lime and soda, with very little carbonate of lime. It is known that common salt and carbonate of lime left in a mass for some time together partly decompose each other, though this does not happen with small quantities in solution. As the half decomposed shells in the lower parts are associated with much common salt, together with some of the saline substances composed in the upper saline layer, and as these shells are corroded and decayed in a remarkable manner, I strongly suspect that this double decomposition has here taken place. The resultant salt, however, ought to be carbonate of soda and myriate of lime—the latter is present, but not the carbonate of soda. Hence, I am led to imagine that by some unexplained means the carbonate of soda becomes changed into the sulfate. It is obvious that the saline layer could not have been preserved in any country in which abundant rain occasionally fell. On the other hand, this very circumstance, which at first sight appears so highly favourable to the long preservation of exposed shells, has probably been the indirect means, through the common salt not having been washed away, of their decomposition and early decay. I was much interested by finding on the terrace, at the height of eighty-five feet, embedded amidst the shells, and much sea-drifted rubbish, some bits of cotton thread, plaited rush, and the head of a stalk of Indian corn. I compared these relics with similar ones taken out of the wakas, or old Peruvian tombs, and found them identical in appearance. On the mainland, in front of San Lorenzo, near Bella Vista, there is an extensive and level plain, about a hundred feet high, of which the lower part is formed of alternating layers of sand and impure clay, together with some gravel, and the surface to the depth of from three to six feet, of a reddish loam containing a few scattered seashells, and numerous small fragments of course, red, urban wear, more abundant at certain spots than others. At first I was inclined to believe that this superficial bed, from its wide extent in smoothness, must have been deposited beneath the sea, but I afterwards found in one spot, that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones. It seems, therefore, most probable, that at a period when the land stood at a lower level, there was a plain very similar to that now surrounding Gayao, which being protected by a single beach, is raised but very little above the level of the sea. This plain, with its underlying red clay beds, I imagine that the Indians manufactured their earthen vessels, and that, during some violent earthquake, the sea broke over the beach, and converted the plain into a temporary lake, as happened round Gayao in 1713 and 1746. The water would then have deposited mud containing fragments of pottery from the kilns, more abundant at some spots than at others, and shells from the sea. This bed, with fossil earthen wear, stands at about the same height with the shells on the lower terrors of San Lorenzo, in which the cotton thread and other relics were embedded. So we may safely conclude that within the Indo-human period there has been an elevation, as before alluded to, of more than eighty-five feet, for some little elevation must have been lost by the coast having subsided since the old maps were engraved. At Valparaiso, although in the two hundred and twenty years before our visit, the elevation cannot have exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1817 there has been a rise partly insensible and partly by a start during the shock of 1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity of the Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five feet rise of the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remarkable, as on the coast of Patagonia when the land stood about the same number of feet lower, the Macruchenia was a living beast. But as the Patagonian coast is some way distant from the Corvillera, the rising there may have been slower than here. At Bahia Blanca, the elevation has been only a few feet since the numerous gigantic quadrupeds were there entombed. And according to the generally received opinion, when these extinct animals were living, man did not exist. But the rising of that part of the coast of Patagonia is perhaps no way connected with the Corvillera, but rather with the line of old volcanic rocks in Banda Oriental, so that it may have been infinitely slower than on the shores of Peru. All these speculations, however, must be vague, for who will pretend to say that there may not have been several periods of subsidence intercalated between the movements of elevation? For we know that along the whole coast of Patagonia there have certainly been many and long pauses in the upward action of the Elevatory forces. CHAPTER 17 PART 1 OF THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGL This is a LibriVox recording, all the LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information on to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Lizzie Driver. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin CHAPTER 17 PART 1 Galapagos Archipelago The whole group volcanic, numbers of craters, leafless bushes colony at Charles Island, James Island, Salt Lake and craters, natural history of the group, ornithology curious finches, reptiles, great tortoises, habits of, marine lizard, feeds on seaweed, terrestrial lizard, burrowing habits, herbivorous, importance of reptiles in the archipelago, fishes, shells, insects, botany, American type of organization, differences in the species or races on different islands, tameness of the birds, fear of man and acquired instinct. September 15th This archipelago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the equator, and between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rocks. A few fragments of granite, curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the larger islands, are of an immense size, and they rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable smaller orifices. I scarcely hesitate to affirm, that there must be, in the whole archipelago, at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava or scurry, or of finely stratified sandstone-like tough. Most of the latter are beautifully symmetrical. They owe their origin to eruptions of volcanic mud without any lava. It is a remarkable circumstance, that every one of the twenty-eight tough craters which were examined, had their southern sides either much lower than the other sides, or quite broken down and removed. As all these craters apparently have been formed when standing in the sea, and as the waves from the trade wind, and the swell from the open Pacific, here unite their forces on the southern coasts of all the island, their singular uniformity in the broken state of the crates, composed of the soft and yielding tough, is easily explained. Considering that these islands are placed directly under the equator, the climate is far from being excessively hot. This seems chiefly caused by the singly low temperature of the surrounding water, brought here by the great southern polar current. Accepting during one short season, very little rain falls, and even then it is irregular, but the clouds generally hang low. Hence, whilst the lower parts of the island are very sterile, the upper parts, at a height of a thousand feet and upwards, possess a damp climate, and a tolerably luxuriant vegetation. This is especially the case on the windward sides of the island, which first receive and condense the moisture from the atmosphere. In the morning, the seventeenth, we landed on Chatham Island, which, like the others, rises with a tame and rounded outline, broken here and there by scattered hillocks, the remains of former craters. Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black balsaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove. We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly. Although I diligently tried to collect as many plants as possible, I succeeded in getting very few, and such wretched-looking little weeds would have better become an Arctic than an equatorial flora. The brushwood appears from a short distance, as leafless as our trees during winter, and it was some time before I discovered that not only almost every plant was now in full leaf, but that the greater number were in flower. The commonest bush is one of the Euphorbiaecia. An acacia, and a great old-looking cactus, are the only trees which afford any shade. After the season of heavy rains, the islands are said to appear for a short time partially green. The volcanic island of Fernando Norona, placed in many respects, under nearly similar conditions, is the only other country where I have seen a vegetation at all like this of the Galapagos islands. The beagles sailed round Chatham Island, and anchored in several bays. One night I slept on shore on a part of the island, where black truncated cones were extraordinary numerous. From one small eminence I counted sixty of them, all surmounted by craters more or less perfect. The greater number consisted merely of a ring of red scurry or slags cemented together, and their height above the plain of lava was not more than from fifty to a hundred feet. None had been very lately active. The entire surface of this part of the island seems to have been permeated like a sieve by the subterranean vapours. Here and there the lava, whilst soft, has been blown into great bubbles, and in other parts the tops of caverns similarly formed have fallen in, leaving circular pits with steep sides. From the regular form of the many craters they gave to the country an artificial appearance, which vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron foundries are most numerous. The day was glowing hot, and the scrambling over the rough surface and through the intricate thickets was very fatiguing. But I was well repaid by the strange cyclopean scene. As I was walking along I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. One was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached it stared at me and slowly walked away. The other gave a deep hiss, and drew in its head. These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals. The few dull-coloured birds cared no more for me than they did for the great tortoises. The twenty-third. The beagle proceeded to Charles Island. This agapelligo has long been frequented, first by the buccaneers, and latterly by whalers. But it is only within the last six years that a small colony has been established here. The inhabitants are between two and three hundred in number. They are nearly all people of colour, who have been banished for political times from the Republic of the Equator, of which Keetor is the capital. The settlement is placed about four and a half miles inland, and at a height probably of a thousand feet. In the first part of the road we passed through leafless thickets, as in Chatham Island. Higher up the woods gradually became greener, and as soon as we crossed the ridge of the island we were called by a fine southerly breeze, and our sight refreshed by a green and thriving vegetation. In this upper region coarse grasses and ferns abound, but there are no tree ferns. I saw nowhere any member of the palm family, which is the more singular. As three hundred and sixty miles northward, Cocoa's Island takes its name from the number of coconuts. The houses are irregularly scattered over a flat space of ground, which is cultivated with sweet potatoes and bananas. It will not easily be imagined how pleasant the sight of black mud was to us, after having been so long accustomed to the parched soil of Peru and northern Chile. The inhabitants, although complaining of poverty, obtain without much trouble the means of substance. In the woods there are many wild pigs and goats, but the staple article of animal food is supplied by the tortoises. Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island, but the people yet count on two days hunting, giving them food for the rest of the week. It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as seven hundred, and that the ship's company of a frigate, some years since, brought down in one day two hundred tortoises to the beach, September 29th. We doubled the southwest extremity of Albemarle Island, and the next day we nearly becalmed between it and Narbarre Island. Both are covered with immense deluges of black naked lava, which have flowed either over the rims of the Great Cauldrons, like pitch, over the rim of a pot in which it has been boiled, or have burst forth from smaller orifices on the flanks. In their descent they have spread over miles of the sea coast. On both of these islands eruptions are known to have taken place, and in Albemarle we saw a small jet of smoke curling from the summit of one of the great craters. In the evening we anchored in Banks Cove, in Albemarle Island. The next morning I went out walking. To the south of the broken tough crater, in which the beagle was anchored, there was another beautifully symmetrical one of an elliptical form. Its longer axis was a little less than a mile, and its depth about five hundred feet. At its bottom there was a shallow lake, in the middle of which a tiny crater formed an islet. The day was overpoweringly hot, and the lake looked clear and blue. I hurried down the cindery slope, and, choked with dust, eagerly tasted the water. But to my sorrow I found its salt as brine. The rocks on the coast abounded with great black lizards, between three and four feet long. And on the hills, an ugly yellowish-brown species was equally common. We saw many of this latter kind, some clumsily running out of the way, and others shuffling into their burrows. I shall presently describe in more detail the habits of both these reptiles. The whole of the northern part of Albemarle Island is miserably sterile. October 8th We arrived at James Island. This island, as well as Charles Island, were long since thus named after our kings of the Stuart Line. Mr. Bino, myself, and our servants were left here for a week, with provisions and a tent, whilst the beagle went for water. We found here a party of Spaniards, who had been sent from Charles Island to dry fish, and to salt tortoise-meat, about six miles inland, and at the height of nearly two thousand feet, a hovel had been built in which two men lived, who were employed in catching tortoises, while the others were fishing on the coast. I paid this party two visits, and slept there one night. As in the other islands, the lower regions was covered by nearly leafless bushes. But the trees were here of a larger growth than elsewhere, several being two feet, and some even two feet nine inches in diameter. The upper region being kept damp by the clouds, supports a green and flourishing vegetation. So damp was the ground, that there were large beds, of course, Cyperus, in which great numbers of a very small water-rail lived and bred. Whilst staying in this upper region, we lived entirely upon tortoise-meat. The breast plate roasted, as the gouchos do, carne con curio, with the flesh on it, is very good, and the young tortoises make excellent soup. But otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent. One day we accompanied a party of the Spaniards in their whaleboat to a selena, or a lake from which salt is procured. After landing we had a very rough walk over a rugged field of recent lava, which has almost surrounded a tough crater, at the bottom of which the sea lake lies. The water is only three or four inches deep, and rests on a layer of beautifully crystallized white salt. The lake is quite circular, and is fringed with a board of a bright green succulent plants. The almost precipitous walls of the crater are clothed with wood, so that the scene was altogether both picturesque and curious. A few years since, the sailors, belonging to a ceiling vessel, murdered their captain in this quiet spot, and we saw his skull lying among the bushes. During the greater part of our stay of a week, the sky was cloudless, and if the trade wind failed for an hour, the heat became very oppressive. On two days the thermometer within the tent stood for some hours, at 93 degrees, but in the open air, in the wind and sun, at only 85 degrees. The sand was extremely hot. The thermometer, placed in some of a brown colour, immediately rose to 137 degrees. And how much above that it would have risen I do not know, for it was not graduated any higher. The black sand felt much hotter, so that even in thick boots it was quite disagreeable to walk over it. The natural history of these islands is immensely curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else. There is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands. Yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent, by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at the confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhere near to that great fact, that mystery of mysteries, the first appearance of new beings on this earth. Of terrestrial mammals, there is only one which must be considered as indigenous, Mars Galapaguenesis, and this is confined, as far as I could ascertain, Chachatum Island, the most easterly island of the group. It belongs, as I am informed by Mr. Waterhouse, to a division of the family of mice characteristic of America. At James Island, there is a rat sufficiently distinct from the common kind to have been named and described by Mr. Waterhouse. But as it belongs to the old world division of the family, and as this island has been frequented by ships for the last hundred and fifty years, I can hardly doubt that this rat is merely a variety produced by the new and peculiar climate, food and soil, to which it has been subjected, although no one has a right to speculate without distinct facts. Yet, even with respect to the Chachatum Island mouse, it should be borne in mind that it may possibly be an American species imported here. For I have seen, in a most unfrequented part of the Pampas, a native mouse living in the roof of a newly built hovel, and therefore its transportation in a vessel is not improbable. Analogous facts have been observed by Dr. Richardson in North America. Of land birds, I obtain twenty-six kinds, all peculiar to the group and found nowhere else, with the exception of one lark-like finch from North America, Dollyconics or Zivorus, which ranges on that continent as far north as fifty-four degrees, and generally frequent marshes. The other twenty-five birds consist, firstly of a hawk, curiously intermediate in structure, between a buzzard, and the American group of carrying feeding polyboree. And with these latter birds it agrees most closely in every habit and even tone of voice. Secondly, there are two owls, representing the short-eared and white barn owls of Europe, thirdly a wren, three tyrant flycatchers, two of them species of pyrocephalus, one or both of them would be ranked by some ornithologists as only varieties, and a dove, all analogous to, but distinct from, American species, fourthly a swallow, which though differing from the prognome propurea of both Americas, only in being rather dull-coloured, smaller and slender, is considered by Mr. Gould as specifically distinct. Fifthly there are three species of mocking-thrush, a form highly characteristic of America. The remaining land-birds form a most singular group of finches, related to each other in the structure of their beaks, short tails, form of body and plumage. There are thirteen species, which Mr. Gould has divided into four subgroups. All these species are peculiar to this archipelago, and so is the whole group, with the exception of one species of the subgroup cactornus, lately brought from Boe Island in the low archipelago. Of cactornus the two species may be often seen climbing about the flowers of the great cactus trees, but all the other species of this group of finches, mingled together in flocks, feed on the dry and sterile ground of the lower districts. The males of all, or certainly of the greater number, are jet-black, and the females, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are brown. The most curious fact is the perfect gradation in the size of the beaks, in the different species of geospisa. From one as large as that of a hawfinch, to that of a chaffinch, and, if Mr. Gould is right, in including his subgroup, Sothedia, in the main group, even to that of a warbler. The largest beak in the genus of geospisa is shown in figure one, and the smallest in figure three, but instead of there being only one intermediate species, with a beak of the size shown in figure two. There are no less than six species with insensibly graduated beaks. The beak of the subgroup Cathedia is shown in figure four. The beak of Cactornus is somewhat like that of a starling, and that of the fourth subgroup, Camarinacus, is slightly parrot-shaped. Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intermittently related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original pasity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends. In a like manner, it might be fancied that a bird originally a buzzard, had been induced here to undertake the office of the carrion-feeding polybori of the American continent. Of waders and water-birds, I was able to get only eleven kinds, and of these only three, including a rail confined to the damp summits of the islands, a new species. Considering the wandering habits of the gulls, I was surprised to find that the species inhabiting these islands is peculiar, but allied to one from the southern parts of South America. The far greater peculiarity of the land-birds, namely twenty-five out of twenty-six, being new species, or at least new races, compared with the waders and web-footed birds, is in accordance with the greater range which these latter orders have in all parts of the world. We shall hear after see this law of aquatic forms, whether marine or freshwater, being less peculiar at any given point of the earth's surface, than the terrestrial forms of the same classes, strikingly illustrated in the shells and, in a lesser degree, in the insects of this archipelago. Two of the waders are rather smaller than the same species brought from other places. The swallow is also smaller, though it is doubtful whether or not it is distinct from its analogue. The two owls, the two tyrant-catchers, pyrocephalus, and the dove, are also smaller than the analogous but distinct species to which they are most nearly related. On the other hand, the gull is rather larger. The two owls, the swallow, all three species of mockingthrush, the dove in its separate colours, though not in its whole plumage, though totanus and the gull, are likewise duskier colour than their analogueous species. And in the case of the mockingthrush and the totanus, than any other species of the two genera, with the exception of a wren with a fine yellow breast, and of a tyrant flycatcher with a scarlet tuft and breast, none other birds are brilliantly coloured, as might have been expected in the equatorial district. Hence it would appear probable that the same causes which here make the immigrants of some peculiar species smaller, make most of the peculiar Galapagian species also smaller, as well as very generally more dusky coloured. All the plants have a wretched, weedy appearance, and I did not see one beautiful flower. The insects again are small-sized and dull-coloured, and as Mr. Waterhouse informs me, there is nothing in their general appearance which would have led him to imagine that they had come from under the equator. Open footnote. The progress of research has shown that some of these birds, which were then thought to be confined to the islands, occur on the American continent. The eminent ornithologist, Mr. Sklatser, informs me that this is the case with the Strix, Pungtatisema, and Pyrocephalus nanus, and probably with the Otus, Galapaguenesis, and Zenaida Galapaguenesis, so that the number of endemic birds is reduced to 23, or probably to 21. Mr. Sklatser thinks that one or two of these endemic forms should be ranked rather as varieties and species, which always seemed to me probable. End of footnote. The birds, plants and insects have a desert character, and are not more brilliantly coloured than those from Southern Patagonia. We may therefore conclude that the usual gaudy colouring of the intertropical productions is not related either to the heat or light of those zones, but to some other cause, perhaps to the conditions of existence being generally favourable to life. End of Chapter 17 Part 1