3i6APPEx\RANCE OF THE CORDILLERA, [chap. xv. 



scarce, and men search for it over every hill and dale ; 

 and by this means nearly all the richest mines have there 

 been discovered. Chanuncillo, from which silver to the 

 value of many hundred thousand pounds has been raised 

 in the course of a few years, was discovered by a man who 

 threw a stone at his loaded donkey, and thinking that it 

 was very heavy, he picked it up, and found it full of pure 

 silver : the vein occurred at no great distance, standing up 

 like a wedge of metal. The miners, also, taking a crowbar 

 with them, often wander on Sundays over the mountains. 

 In this south part of Chile, the men who drive cattle into 

 the Cordillera, and who frequent every ravine where there 

 is a little pasture, are the usual discoverers. 



March 20th. — As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, 

 with the exception of a few pretty alpine flowers, became 

 exceedingly scanty ; and of quadrupeds, birds or insects, 

 scarcely one could be seen. The lofty mountains, their 

 summits marked with a few patches of snow, stood well 

 separated from each other ; the valleys being filled up with 

 an immense thickness of stratified alluvium. The features 

 in the scenery of the Andes which struck me most, as 

 contrasted with the other mountain chains with which I am 

 acquainted, were — the flat fringes sometimes expanding 

 into narrow plains on each side of the valleys — the bright 

 colours, chiefly red and purple, of the utterly bare and 

 precipitous hills of porphyry — the grand and continuous 

 wall-like dikes — the plainly-divided strata, which, where 

 nearly vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central 

 pinnacles, but where less inclined, composed the great 

 massive mountains on the outskirts of the range — and 

 lastly, the smooth conical piles of fine and bright-coloured 

 detritus which sloped up at a high angle from the base of 

 the mountains, sometimes to a height of more than 2000 

 feet. 



I frequently observed, both in Tierra del Fuego and 

 within the Andes, that where the rock was covered during 

 the greater part of the year with snow, it was shivered in a 

 very extraordinary manner into small angular fragments. 

 Scoresby* has observed the same fact in Spitzbergen. The 

 case appears to me rather obscure : for that part of the 

 mountain which is protected by a mantle of snow, must be 

 less subject to repeated and great changes of temperature 

 than any other part. I have sometimes thought, that the 



* Scoresby's "Arctic Regions," vol. i. p. 122. 



