GEOGRAPHICAL EESEAECH. 277 



the Carabaya mountains, in the Inambari basin, are known only from the descrip- 

 tions of the early chroniclers. 



Thanks to the attractions of a country whose riches were increased a hundred- 

 fold by report, a great number of adventurers hastened to Lima, amongst whom 

 were some explorers and even historians, who have left to posterity valuable 

 descriptions of the land, of the customs, institutions, and social life of its 

 inhabitants. Some of the writers took part in the events of that terrible 

 epoch, while Garcilaso de la Vega, the chief historian of the generation that 

 followed the Conquest, belonged at once to both races — Spanish on his father's 

 side, Peruvian on his mother's, and grandson of an Inca. 



After the conquerors came the missionaries, who crossed the plateaux to 

 evangelise the tribes of the Amazonian slope, and gather thera into the fold 

 round about the parochial churches. These men made important geographical 

 discoveries ; Simon Jara, amongst others, penetrated into those magnificent plains 

 known as the Pampa del Sacramento, which form the " Mesopotamia " between 

 the Rios Huallaga and Ucayali. 



But the work of the missionaries was not lasting ; the groups that they had 

 brought together died away ; the roads traced through the woodlands were 

 obliterated ; solitude spread over those regions, which have to be again discovered, 

 and which are now far less thickly peopled than at that time. 



But many geographical points have been scientifically determined, and these 

 are being connected by the continually contracting meshes of a network of 

 itineraries. Since the War of Independence, Peru has been freely thrown open 

 and traversed by numerous men of science, several of whom have left their mark 

 in the records of systematic exploration. Such are Pentland, Meyen, Poeppi»-, 

 Grandidier, Tsehudi, Squier, Jimenez de la Espada, Markham, who have published 

 remarkable descriptions of the interior ; Fitzro}^, Darwin, and recently Gormaz, 

 who have surveyed the seaboard ; D'Orbigny, De Castelnau, Marcoy, Herndon, 

 Gibbon, Chandless, explorers of the trans-Andean watercourses ; Tucker, Black, 

 Werthemann, Guillaume, Marcel Monnier, surveyors more especially of the routes 

 between the Pacific and Atlantic slopes ; Ptivero, Angrand, Wiener, Reiss and 

 Stiibel, whose studies have been mainly directed to the old pojDulations, their 

 monuments and industries. 



For geography, in the stricter sense, the brothers Paz Soldan rank amongst 

 the foremost writers and most useful cartographers, while Antonio Raimondi may 

 be said to have been for Peru what his fellow-countryman, Codazzi, has been 

 for Venezuela and Colombia. His great work on Peru, with the accompanying 

 atlas of thirty-four sheets, is being continued under the direction of the Lima 

 Geographical Society. Various " Andean Clubs " are also co-operating in the 

 work of Peruvian exploration, while special commissions have been appointed to 

 study the hydrography, the agricultural and commercial resources of all the 

 valleys of the Amazonian slope. 



