DESCRIPTIVE GEOGRAPHY. 



13 



Horn. But the Indian tribes aro warlike and merciless, and those who must travel either 

 brave sea-sickness with the storms and snows of the Cape, or take the Uspallata route, rather 

 tlian i-nrtiiinter the rliil.lim of the pampas on their homesteads spectres, armed only with 

 lances HIM! slnn^-balls, who "rush like the wliirl wind, destroy, and are gone," and whose terri- 

 tory, to this day, remains absolutely "terra incognita." 



Table showing the Heights of some of the principal Mountains and Mountain Pastes in Chile 



above sea-level. 



The descent of the limit of perpetual snow through 10,000 feet, in a little more than 800 

 miles, is a fact which cannot fail to arrest the attention of the physical geographer, affording, 

 as it does, conclusive proof of rapid decrease in the mean temperature, and increase in the 

 quantity of water which falls in the form of snow. 



If other evidence than the natural configuration which has heen indicated were necessary 

 to prove that the whole of Chile has been raised from the ocean within a period geologists re- 

 gard very modern, the marine fossils found on the great Cordilleras, the multitude of recent 

 shells that now lie hundreds of feet above their native element, retaining their natural colors, 

 and almost intact though exposed to the constant action of heat and dew, whilst the adjoining 

 ocean contains living members of the same family, and the alluvial strata of the valleys and 

 shelves bounding the rivers, would be ample proofs to convince the most skeptical. That the 

 great central plain was once the bed of an ocean-gulf, similar to the Californian, in which the 

 tides ebbed and flowed, and the islands of Chiloe and the Chonos Archipelago were shoals, or, 

 at most, islets, there cannot be the least doubt. Time after time the great continent sank to 



