DEAD LEVEL APPEARANCE OF THE PAMPAS. 45 



that if possible, larger stretches of apparently dead 

 level country were more common than anywhere else ; 

 and Mr. Darwin seems to have been impressed with 

 the same opinion, for he mentions that 



" For many leagues round San Nicholas and Rosario, the 

 country is really level. Scarcely anything that travellers have 

 written about its extreme flatness can be considered as 

 exaggeration; yet I never could find a spot where, by slowly 

 turning round, objects were not seen at a greater distance ,. 

 in some directions than others; and this manifestly proves 

 the inequality of the plain. At sea, a person's eye, being 

 six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is 2|- 

 miles distant. In like manner, the more level the plain, the 

 more nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow 

 limits; and this in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur, 

 which one would have imagined that a vast level plain would 

 have possessed." * 



There can be no doubt that if the plains were 

 actually level, this would be so; but this, as Mr. 

 Darwin explains, is not so ; and with all due deference 

 to so eminent a scientific authority, we venture to 

 state that our own experience teaches us that throughout 

 all these regions there are here and there to be found 

 positions from whence magnificent panoramas may 

 occasionally be obtained; a conception of whose spa- 

 cious, almost immeasurable grandeur is not easily 

 conveyed in words; and we think we are supported 

 in this by most of the books of travel descriptive 

 of the plains region. That a long march of many 

 days across vast open plains is often oppressive, on 

 account of its monotony, is however generally admitted ; 

 but even in the flattest plains, extensive views are now 

 and then to be had: the traveller is then of course 



* Journal of Researches, etc., by Charles Darwin, p. 127. 



