305 



New Grenada, but is separated from these by a 

 space eighty leagues broad. If we suppose it 

 to have been destroyed in this space by some 

 great revolution of the globe, which is scarcely 

 probable, we must admit, that it anciently 

 branched off from the Andes between Santa Fe 

 de Bogota and Pamplona. This remark serves 

 to fix more easily in the memory of the reader 

 the geographical position of a Cordillera, till 

 now very imperfectly known. A third chain of 

 mountains unites in 16° and 18° of South lati- 

 tude (by Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the Serra- 

 nias of Aguapehy, and the famous Campos dos 

 Parecis ) the Andes of Peru to the mountains 

 of Brazil. It is the Cordillera of Chiquitos that 

 widens in the Capitania de Minas Geraes, and 

 divides the rivers flowing into the Amazon from 

 those of the Rio de la Plata *, not only in the 

 interior of the country, in the meridian of Villa 

 Boa, but also at a few leagues from the coast^ 

 between Rio Janeiro and Bahia 4% 



* There is only a carrying place of 5,322 Iracas between 

 the Guapore (a branch of the Marmore and of the Madeira) 

 and the Rio Aguapehy (a branch of the Jaura and of the 

 Paraguay). See the instructive Journal published at Rio 

 Janeiro under the name of Patriot a, 1813, 5, p. 33. 



+ The Cordillera of Chiquitos and of Brazil stretches to- 

 ward the South-East, in the government of the Rio Grande, 

 beyond the latitude of 30° South. 



VOL. IV. X 



