70 



group of century plants that had been set out about the pavilion 

 and were thriving remarkably well on the good soil and moun- 

 tain air. I think I never saw healthier specimens, even in 

 Mexico, their native home, and every one of the twenty or more 

 bore a huge flower-stalk fifteen or twenty feet in height "v^ith 

 numerous side branches. In Mexico, these stalks would have 

 been nipped off in their early infancy and the juices so generously 

 provided by nature for their development would have been col- 

 lected and manufactured into pulque, a mildly intoxicating 

 drink. 



The Corcovado, or Hunchback, is a very peculiar mountain, 

 being unusually thin, exceedingly precipitous, and so grotesque 

 in shape that I singled it out long before we reached the harbor 

 of Rio, thinking at first it must be a dark mass of clouds. The 

 rock is solid granite, which weathers into a sticky mass of red 

 clay held in place by the abundant vegetation and the constant 

 supply of water that trickles over its surface. There is no frost 

 or ice to disrupt the rock-masses — only the steady wearing away 

 by water and the chemical alteration of the feldspar into clay, 

 releasing the quartz and mica. The rocks which form the 

 foundation of New York City are not granite but mostly gneisses 

 and schists having practically the same chemical composition 

 but of different physical structure, the mica being disposed in 

 layers giving a banded appearance and often causing the masses 

 to split into slabs. With the melting of our snows in the spring, 

 a great deal of potash and other valuable mineral constituents 

 formed during the process of weathering is washed away and 

 becomes lost to the farmer. 



As I gazed on the great and beautiful city of Rio from the 

 summit of Corcovado, four times as high as the Woolworth 

 Building, and looked over its wonderful harbor, encircled by 

 mountains and guarded by rugged islands — all of the hardest 

 granite — I thought how easy it must be to fortify it against all 

 possible attack except from the air; for land and sea have com- 

 bined to render it impregnable from any other direction. 



And now farwell to Corcovado and to Rio for the present. 

 The good ship "Van Dyck" sails for the Argentine in a few 

 minutes. 



