THE 



AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



Aet. XXIII.— The Physiography of the Central Andes: 

 I. The Maritime Andes ; by Isaiah Bowman. 



I. The Maritime Andes. 



Coastal Features. 



Amoxg the long list of features which the western part of 

 South America has in common with the western part of North 

 America, none is perhaps more striking than the recent 

 changes of level for which both are, from the human stand- 

 point, unfortunately too well characterized. The recent 

 destruction of Valparaiso occurred too soon after the San 

 Francisco catastrophe for us to appreciate how appalling it 

 actually was ; while the lack of early newspaper reports from 

 South America in years gone by no less than to-day has kept 

 us from having even a reasonable appreciation of the frequency 

 and destructiveness of the great earthquakes that virtually 

 destroyed Arequipa in i860, and Iquique, Arica, and Pisagua 

 in 1877. 



The entire western seaboard of South America supplies evi- 

 dence of the magnitude of the crustal disturbances that the 

 region has suffered in the past and is suffering to-day. The 

 great height attributed to recent uplifts by Darwin has 

 become a point of classic dispute, but whether his conclusions 

 are accepted or rejected for the locality in question, there are 

 elsewhere indubitable evidences of uplifts as great and import- 

 ant as those he concluded had occurred in Chile. The earth's 

 crust is here unstable to a high degree, and constant changes, 

 large and small, have aggregated an uplift among the most 

 profound of those exhibited on the earth to-day. The cross- 

 section, figure 1, represents the astonishingly abrupt transition 



Am. Jour. Sci. — Fourth Series, Vol. XXVIII, No. 165. — September, 1909. 

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