GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES IN 1869. 



295 



way somewhat more than a half million dol- 

 lars' worth of gold was extracted in a year. 

 Gambling, drunkenness, and lawlessness, were 

 common, as in all gold-mining regions, and 

 human life was not remarkably safe. 



Mr. A. Goering, an English artist and geog- 

 rapher, has explored Venezuela very thoroughly 

 in 1808 and 1869, and gives some interesting 

 details of the Guajiro Indians who occupy the 

 borders of the lake or laguna of Maracaibo. 

 These Indians seem to be the existing repre- 

 sentatives of the extinct lake-dwellers of Swit- 

 zerland and Northern Italy. They build their 

 dwellings with considerable art and intelli- 

 gence, on piles, driven into the shallow flats of 

 the laguna, raising them on platforms fifteen 

 or twenty feet above the surface of the water. 

 These dwellings are in groups, connected by 

 bridges, and have pent roofs, each house con- 

 sisting of two apartments, the front a kitchen 

 and living-room, and the rear their place for 

 sleeping. They sleep in hammocks, and live 

 mostly on fish and mollusks, but are, unlike 

 most of the Indian tribes, scrupulously neat 

 and cleanly. They are athletic, finely formed, 

 rather fond of dress and ornaments, their finery 

 being, however, worn usually only on holidays 

 and special occasions. They come occasionally 

 to the small Venezuelan towns on the shores 

 of the lake, but seldom allow visitors to their 

 villages. They are sharp on a bargain, and 

 have a habit of selling their children to the 

 whites, for education and service, while they 

 are too young to have much remembrance of 

 their homes. 



Brazil has not been able, from the great 

 expense of her protracted war with Paraguay, 

 to make any geographical explorations by her 

 citizens, but several of the European and Amer- 

 ican geographers have devoted much labor and 

 time to the exploration of her, as yet, little- 

 known territory. The Abbe* Durand, a French 

 naturalist, visited and explored very thoroughly 

 the Serra de Caraca, a vast iron mountain in 

 the province of Minas Geraes, and has reported 

 to the French Geographical Society on its min- 

 eral wealth, its vegetable and animal produc- 

 tions, and the facility with which it may be 

 worked. Mr. Chandless, the indefatigable 

 English explorer, has been pushing up the 

 southern affluents of the Amazon, though his 

 discoveries come more properly, perhaps, within 

 the boundaries of Peru than those of Brazil ; 

 and our own countryman, Prof. James Orton, 

 has been exploring the upper waters of 

 the same great river. The Germans are still 

 reenforcing their colonies in Southern Brazil, 

 and it is not impossible that in the future they 

 may be the means of raising the empire to a 

 higher plane of intelligence and progress than 

 it would ever have attained under the slothful, 

 easy, and anti-progressive sway of the mixed 

 races which as yet form the principal popula- 

 tion of the country. From January, 1868, to 

 April, 1869, 5,330 emigrants sailed from Ham- 

 burg for the four Brazilian colonies. Prof. 



Orton's volume, " The Andes and the Amazon," 

 appertains about equally to Ecuador and Brazil, 

 but is replete with valuable information in 

 regard to the navigation of the great river and 

 its tributaries, the physical geography, the 

 geology, fauna, flora, productions, climate, and 

 healthfulness of the Amazonas basin, and the 

 character and condition of the tribes and peo- 

 ples which inhabit it. He has collected also 

 some vocabularies of several of the Indian 

 dialects. Prof. Orton believes most of the 

 Indian tribes (the Quechnas included) of the 

 Great Basin to have come hither from a point 

 farther south, the region of the .La Plata, per- 

 haps, and not from the north, as is generally 

 supposed. One of his discoveries, that of ma- 

 rine-fossil shells in situ, at Pebas on the Mara- 

 fion or upper Amazon, effectually disposes of 

 Agassiz's theory of the glacial origin of the 

 Amazonas basin, and proves that, at no very 

 distant geological period, Guiana was an island. 

 The work is a very valuable addition to a geo- 

 graphical knowledge of South America. 



Mr. Porter C. Bliss, an American who es- 

 caped from Lopez's oppression in Paraguay, in 

 1868, read a paper before the American Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science, at its 

 meeting in Salem, in August, 1869, on " A New 

 Classification of the South American Indians, 

 on the Basis of Philology." It has been stated 

 that there were from 150 to 2,000 distinct 

 though correlated languages spoken by the 

 Indians of South America. Mr. Bliss denies 

 this, and states, as the result of a careful study 

 of the South American languages for many 

 years, that there are not more than twelve or 

 thirteen stock languages among the Indians of 

 the continent, the rest being merely dialects. 

 Of these, the Guarani and the Quechna are 

 the principal and the most widely spoken. 

 These two languages have a considerable vocab- 

 ulary, while most of the others are meagre, 

 containing not more than a thousand root 

 words. Reduplication was a principle largely 

 concerned in the formation of both the Quechna 

 and Guarani languages. Mr. Bliss had found 

 more than three hundred geographical names 

 formed by this process, such as Mo-co-mo-co, 

 Co-ro-co-ro, Titi-ca-ca, etc. 



In Patagonia, and the Straits of Magellan, 

 there have been two capable explorers the past 

 year Don Guillermo Cox, in Patagonia, and 

 Captain R. 0. Mayne, R. N., one of the Ad- 

 miralty survey officers who was engaged from 

 1866 to May, 1869, in making an accurate and 

 careful survey of the straits, a route which is 

 now very generally preferred by both steamers 

 and sailing-vessels, to the more tempestuous 

 route outside the Horn. Captain Mayne states 

 that the straits are 300 miles in length, and 

 from 2 to 20 miles in width. At the entrance 

 from the Atlantic, the land is a low prairie, and 

 the skies are generally bright, but farther on 

 the straits are narrow, shut in by high perpen- 

 dicular mountains, and drenched by almost 

 constant rains, snow, or hail. He saw much 



