340 SOUTHERN AND WESTERN SHORES OF THE CONTINENT. 



The inhabitants of this region are among the lowest in the 

 scale of human beings, living in wretched hovels, composed 

 often merely of boughs and leaves, their only clothing scanty 

 pieces of skin, worn on one side, to defend themselves from 

 the icy winds. 



These ever-green forests, consisting of only two or three 

 species of trees, with several Alpine plants glowing on the 



INHABITANTS OF TIERRA DEL FUJ'.uo. 



heights above them, continue round the coast for six hundred 

 miles or more northward of Cape Horn, till, in the more 

 northern and warmer latitudes, they give place to semi-tropical 

 vegetation. Now stately trees of various kinds appear, with 

 smooth and highly-coloured bark, loaded with parasitical 

 plants ; while large and elegant ferns, and numerous and ar- 

 borescent grasses, entwine the trees into one entangled mass. 



