THE WORLD'S WONDERS. 53 



than 100 years ago, accurately described it in these words : 



DESTRUCTIVE TIDES OF THE AMAZON. 



" DURING three days before the full and new moons, the period 

 of highest tides, the sea, instead of occupying six hours to reach 

 its flood, swells to its highest limits in one or two minutes. The 

 noise of this terrible flood is heard five or six miles and increases 

 as it approaches. Presently may be seen a liquid promontory, 

 twelve or fifteen feet high, followed by another and another, and 

 sometimes by a fourth. These watery mountains spread across 

 the whole channel, and advance with a prodigious rapidity, rend- 

 ing and crushing everything in their way. Immense trees are 

 instantly uprooted by it, and sometimes whole tracts of laud are 

 swept away." 



Another characteristic feature is the system of back channels 

 joining the tributaries, and the canoe paths through the forest. 

 Following these narrow water roads one may go in a canoe from 

 Santaren 1,000 miles up the Amazon without once ever entering 

 the river. 



The enormous valley of the Amazon is walled in by the Andes 

 and the highlands of Guiana and Matto Grosso. No other region 

 of equal area has such a remarkably uniform character, and its 

 geological formation is of deep interest. The territory through 

 which the Amazon flows is covered with vast forests and pos- 

 sesses a soil of extraordinary fertility. "If," says Humboldt, 

 44 the name of primeval forest can be given to any forests on the 

 face of the earth, none, perhaps, can so strictly claim it as those 

 that fill the connected basin of the Orinoco and Amazon." 

 "From the grassy steppes of Venezuela to the treeless pampas 

 of Buenos Ayres," says a later traveler, "expands a sea of ver- 

 dure in which we may draw a circle of 1,100 miles in diameter, 

 which shall include an evergreen, unbroken forest. There is a 

 most bewildering diversity of grand and beautiful trees a wild, 

 unconquered race of vegetable giants, draped, festooned, corded, 

 matted and ribboned with climbing and creeping plants, woody 

 and succulent in endless variety." 



Animal life is not so conspicuous in the forest as on the river ; 



