14 MBAN WATER-LEVEL. 



These natural desiccations, so important to agriculture, 

 have been considerable durit % the last ten years, in which 

 America has suffered from great droughts. Instead of mark- 

 ing the sinuosities of the present banks of the lake, I have 

 advised the rich landholders in these countries to fix 

 columns of granite in the basin itself, in order to observe 

 from year to year the mean height of the waters. The 

 Marquis del Toro has undertaken to put this design into 

 execution, employing the fine granite of the Sierra de 

 Mariara, and establishing limnometers, on a bottom of gneiss 

 rock, so common in the lake of Valencia. 



It is impossible to anticipate the limits, more or less 

 narrow, to which this basin of water will one day be con- 

 fined, when an equilibrium between the streams flowing in 

 and the produce of evaporation and filtration, shall be com- 

 pletely established. The idea very generally spread, that 

 the lake will soon entirely disappear, seems to me chimerical. 

 If in consequence of great earthquakes, or other causes 

 equally mysterious, ten very humid years should succeed 

 to long droughts; if the mountains should again become 

 clothed with forests, and great trees overshadow the shore 

 and the plains of Aragua, we should more probably see the 

 volume of the waters augment, and menace that beautiful 

 cultivation which now trenches on the basin of the lake. 



While some of the cultivators of the valleys of Aragua 

 fear the total disappearance of the lake, and others its re- 

 turn to the banks it has deserted, we hear the question 

 gravely discussed at Caracas, whether it would not be advis- 

 able, in order to give greater extent to agriculture, to 

 conduct the waters of the lake into the Llanos, by digging a 

 canal towards the Bio Pao. The possibility* of this enter- 



* The dividing ridge, namely, that which divides the waters between 

 the valleys of Aragua and the Llanos, lowers so much towards the west of 

 Guigue, as we have already observed, that there are ravines which conduct 

 the waters of the Caflo de Cambury, the Rio Valencia, and the Guataparo, 

 in the time of floods, to the Rio Pao ; but it would be easier to open a 

 navigable canal from the lake of Valencia to the Orinoco, by the Pao, the 

 Portuguesa, and the Apure, than to dig a draining canal level with the 

 bottom of the lake. This bottom, according to the sounding, and my 

 barometric measurements, is 40 toises less than 222, or 182 above the 

 surface of the ocean. On the road from Guigue to the Llanos, by the 

 table-land of La Villa de Cura, I found, to the south of the dividing 



