THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE 



337 



stands something about the appearance of ores. In the great 

 mining provinces of Coquimbo and Copiapo, firewood is very- 

 scarce, and men search for it over every hill and dale ; and 

 by this means nearly all the richest mines have there been 

 discovered. Chanuncillo, from which silver to the value of 

 many hundred thousand pounds has been raised in the course 

 of a few years, was discovered by a man who threw a stone 

 at his loaded donkey, and thinking that it was very heavy, he 

 picked it up, and found it full of pure silver : the vein oc- 

 curred at no great distance, standing up like a wedge of 

 metal. The miners, also, taking a crowbar with them, often 

 wander on Sundays over the mountains. In this south part 

 of Chile, the men who drive cattle into the Cordillera, and 

 who frequent every ravine where there is a little pasture, are 

 the usual discoverers. 



20th— As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, with 

 the exception of a few pretty alpine flowers, became exceed- 

 ingly scanty; and of quadrupeds, birds, or insects, scarcely 

 one could be seen. The lofty mountains, their summits 

 marked with a few patches of snow, stood well separated 

 from each other, the valleys being filled up with an immense 

 thickness of stratified alluvium. The features in the scenery 

 of the Andes which struck me most, as contrasted with the 

 other mountain chains with which I am acquainted, were — 

 the flat fringes sometimes expanding into narrow plains on 

 each side of the valleys,— the bright colours, chiefly red and 

 purple, of the utterly bare and precipitous hills of porphyry, 

 the grand and continuous wall-like dykes,— the plainly- 

 divided strata which, where nearly vertical, formed the pic- 

 turesque and wild central pinnacles, but where less inclined, 

 composed the great massive mountains on the outskirts of the 

 range,— and lastly, the smooth conical piles of fine and 

 brightly coloured detritus, which sloped up at a high angle 

 from the base of the mountains, sometimes to a height of 

 more than 2000 feet. 



I frequently observed, both in Tierra del Fuego and within 

 the Andes, that where the rock was covered during the greater 

 part of the year with snow, it was shivered in a very extraor- 

 dinary manner into small angular fragments. Scoresby 1 

 1 Scoresby's Arctic Regions, vol. i. p. 122. 



