GEOUK. \Plllr.J. i:\TI.i >i:ATIONS AND DISCoYKklKS IN 1886. 



343 



.:<<! it-* hei-ht . illy, and i. 



sea le\.-l. \\liilo 

 the village of I 



t' tin- volcano since 1859 has 

 ilar. It was not percept i- 

 irthquako of December 8, 

 o as to destroy the 

 of llio neighboring village 

 iniptimis havo not been quite 

 BO c<< ice that time, and in 1863 it 



:.-raMe stream of lava sufficient 

 <s of stones and ashes forming 

 its southern slope, as with a mantle. It has 

 now three small craters within the principal 

 t thirty, one fifty, and another 

 r. Professor von Seebach 

 lid contents of the volcanic 

 ;ain at 949,820,000 cubic feet. All this 

 has been thrown up in about seventy-two 

 . This h-arned and indefatigable traveller 

 sod .ill the Central American States, giv- 

 ing special attention to the numerous volcanoes 

 of the Cordilleras of Central America, and his 

 researches have made us more familiar with the 

 topography and extent of these safety-valves of 

 the continent than those of any previous trav- 

 eller. 



II. SOUTH AMERICA. 1. The United States 

 General Mosquera, now for 

 the third time President of these States, 

 has .published within the last year a very 

 I etc hand-book of the country over 

 which he presides, under the title of "Com- 

 pendio de Geograf ia General de los Estados do 

 Colombia." It is accompanied by an atlas of 

 maps, corrected from the surveys of Codazzi 

 and others, under the general's special direc- 

 tions. This work gives a very full and satis- 

 factory account of the present condition, of 

 these States. Apropos of the atlas which ac- 

 companies this work, M. Elis6e Reclus, in a re- 

 port made to the Societe de Geographic in Au- 

 gust, 18CG, gives a sketch of the geographical 

 explorations of Agostino Codazzi, an Italian 

 geographer long resident in Colombia, who was 

 engaged from 1850 to 1856 in surveying and 

 triangulating the territories comprised in the 

 Vnited States of Colombia, and who dually fell a 

 victim to his zeal and devotion in 1856 at Cam- 

 perucho, in the valley of the Bio Cesar. Judg- 

 ing from M. Reclus' narrative, all that Colom- 

 bia has of accurate topographical surveys, with 

 the exception of the British surveys of the 

 coast, she owes to Codazzi, whose laborious 

 and careful surveys and descriptions still remain 

 unpublished. In 1855 Codazzi's surveys joined 

 those of Lieutenant Strain on the Isthmus of 

 Darien, though they did not, like his, terminate 

 in disaster. 



2. Peru and Bolivia. Mr. E. G. Squier 

 communicates to the London Athenaeum in 

 February, 1866, his discovery of a lake near 

 di/co, in the Andes, which had two distinct 

 and opposite outlets, one flowing into Lake 

 Titicaca, the other into one of the affluents of 

 the Amazon. This lake is situated fn 14 30' 



south latitude, 70 60' west longitude from 

 Greenwich, and is about 14,500 feet above the 

 ;' the sea. 



HI-IT 1 1 ugu Keck, a (Jen nan civ il engineer, who 

 has for many years been resident iu P>livia, is 

 continuing in Petcrmann's Mittheilungen his 

 descriptive geography of that country. There 

 has been no official census taken since 1846-'6, 

 and in t hat the number of wild or savage Indians 

 was estimated, though with tolerable accuracy. 

 At that date the IILspano- American population 

 and the partially civilized Indians numbered 

 1,878,896 persons, and the savage or independ- 

 ent Indians were estimated at TT-0,000, making 

 a grand total of 2,138,896 for the whole popu- 

 lation of the Republic. Senor Ondarza, who 

 published a map of the country in 1859, made 

 his estimate of the population in 1858 from the 

 returns of the provinces, and put down the 

 population, except the savage Indians, at 1,742,- 

 352 persons, while, according to time, the 

 number of savages had fallen off to 245,000, 

 giving a grand aggregate of 1,987,352. Still 

 later, in 1861, in an "Essay toward the Hi 

 tory of Bolivia," by Manuel Jos6 Cortes, pub- 

 lished at Sucre (the Capital of the Republic) 

 in 1861, the entire population is stated at 2,236,- 

 116 persons. The population of the several de- 

 partments is not given by Cortes, but Ondar- 

 za states them, in 1858, as follows : La Paz, 475,- 

 322; Cochabamba, 349,892; Potosi, 281,229; 

 Chuquisaca, 223,668; Omro, 110,931; Santa 

 Cruz, 153,164; Tanja, 88,900 ; Veni, 53,973; 

 Atacama, 5,273. The area of the Republic is 

 stated by Herr Reck as 843,307 square miles. 

 The Republic is divided into nine departments, 

 and has 12 capital cities, 35 other cities, 282 

 small towns or villages, 2,755 hamlets, and 7,823 

 isolated farms or ranches. The population av- 

 erages about 2.9 to the square mile. 



The attention of geographers has, during the 

 past two years, been largely attracted toward 

 Brazil, where three separate expeditions have 

 been engaged in exploring some of its great 

 rivers. Professor Agassiz, with a corps of able 

 assistants, explored the lower Amazons, mainly 

 for the purpose of ascertaining the new genera 

 and species of fishes, radiates, mollusks, and 

 zoophytes therein contained, though with gen- 

 eral reference also to the animals and plants 

 which inhabit its shores, and the geology and 

 paleontology of the region. Mr. W. Cbandless, 

 an English traveller and geographer, made two 

 exploring tours, at his own expense, with com- 



Eetent assistance, up the Purus, one of the 

 irgest tributaries of the upper Amazons, to 

 near its source, with a view of ascertaining 

 whether there was, as reported, a navigable or 

 ] Tactical communication between the waters of 

 the Atlantic and those of the Pacific through 

 the supposed connection between this river and 

 the Madre de Dios, a river of Southern Peru, 

 Laving its sources in the Andes, and discharging 

 its waters into the Pacific. A third expedition, 

 undertaken somewhat earlier, at the direction 

 of the Brazilian Government, but not published 



