24 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OP PEKU. 



in return, it affords other advantages, which are not only able 

 to keep up the balance, but also to give a preponderance to 

 the side of the territory. For the archite6lure of this Cordil- 

 lera appears to be altogether distin6l from that which Nature 

 displays in the organization of the rest of the globe ; or, rather, 

 it is its design and completion. Divided into two parts, it 

 composes as many worlds, the one high, the other low, in 

 v/hich, as has already been said, is united whatever distin- 

 guishes Africa from Asia, and both of them conjointly from 

 Europe. 



. The high world occupies the ground which separates the 

 two above-mentioned chains of mountains, the summits of 

 which are distant from each otliQie, ten, twenty, and, in 

 some instances, fifty leagues. It indeed happens that in some 

 places they meet and unite, by the interposition of a third Cor- 

 dillera, which runs east and west. Such is that of Asuay and 

 Moxanda, in the kingdom of Quito*. Notwithstanding its 



soil, 



declivities of the southern mountains, and of the insalubrity of the summits of the 

 Cordillera, it would be impossible to people and cultivate them, we can venture to 

 assert that, even if it were prafiicable to execute both^ the curvatures., declivities, and 

 hollows of the mountains would not add one handful of useful soil to that which their 

 bases would afford, if they did not exist. This proposition, paradoxical as it may- 

 appear, is an incontestible truth, since all the trees which are planted on the convex 

 superficies of a mountain have to stand perpendicularly to the horizon, and must con- 

 sequently have, on the horizontal base, as many points of correspondence and sup- 

 port as they occupy in the mountain. Hence it results that, the space which the 

 plane affords being already filled up, nothing more can be planted or sown in all the 

 unequal surfaces of the mountain by which it is occupied. It is equally demon- 

 strable, that a mountainous territory can contain no more houses or inhabitants than 

 the base it occupies, supposing it levelled. 



* Father Amrich, in his complete history, in manuscript, 'of the missions to the 



Andes 



