COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF SOUTH AMERICA. 391 



coming back to land. . . . We have at present very modest aims. 

 I should prefer for some time to simply develop lines like the one 

 at Glynde ; but I am quite sure that in future, when more capital 

 than we have had at our command is employed to develop the 

 system, we shall have trains of skeps passing down empty into 

 coal-mines and along the workings, to be filled by the men as they 

 dig the coal from the face, coming back to the bottom of the pit, 

 and, moving up a vertical rod, passing on to the ordinary lines at 

 the surface, and then without stopping, except perhaps to be 

 labeled, traveling along, shunted from point to point by men 

 properly stationed, who will know what to do with each train by 

 the ticket upon it, until they will eventually reach the door of the 

 customer who is to use the coal. The immense amount of worry 

 which there has been in the development of telpherage, even as we 

 now see it, shows me that its grandest developments can not come 

 in my own time ; but that it must come in the long run ; and that 

 telpherage will be a general system of distribution of goods is a 

 fact which is fixed in my mind so securely that no amount of 

 disappointment or worry can remove it." 



-*♦♦- 



THE COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF SOUTH AMERICA.* 



By GEOEGE G. CHISHOLM, F. E. G. S. 



THIS, the smaller half of the New World, has at least four 

 fifths of its area within the tropics, and hence yields chiefly 

 tropical products ; but here as elsewhere the temperate area, rela- 

 tively to its extent, furnishes a greater abundance of commercial 

 commodities, and it is in this part of the continent that the rate of 

 increase in the production of such commodities, and the develop- 

 ment of means of distribution for them, are now most rapid, and 

 European immigration is most constant. 



The lofty chains of the Andes, on the west side of the conti- 

 nent, form an important climatic barrier. In the latitudes in 

 which the trade winds prevail they arrest the moisture-laden 

 winds from the Atlantic, draining the moisture out of winds that 

 had already been partly drained in their course over the conti- 

 nent farther east. The Andes also constitute a great obstacle to 

 communication between the east and west coasts. There is as yet 

 , no railway that completely crosses any part of them, though there 

 are railways which reach a height of upward of fourteen thou- 

 sand feet before attaining the table-lands between the principal 

 chains of these mountains. 



* From the author's Handbook of Commercial Geography, recently published by Long- 

 mans, Green L Co., London and New York. 



