14 
MEAN WATER-LEVEL. 
These natural desiccations, so important to agriculture, 
have been considerable during the last ten years, in which 
America has suffered from great droughts. Instead of ma rl,-, 
ing the sinuosities of the present banks of the lake, I have 
advised the rich landholders in these countries to fix 
columns of granite in the basin itself, in order to observe 
from year to year the mean height of the waters. The 
Marquis del Toro has undertaken to put this design into 
execution, employing the fine granite of the Sierra de 
Mariara, and establishing livinomcters, on a bottom of <meiss 
rock, so common in the lake of Valencia. 
It is impossible to anticipate the limits, more or less 
narrow, to which this basin of water will one day be con- 
fined, when an equilibrium between the streams flowing in 
and the produce of evaporation and filtration, shall be com- 
pletely established. The idea very generally spread, that 
the lake will soon entirely disappear, seems to me chimerical. 
If in consequence of great earthquakes, or other causes 
equally mysterious, ten very humid years should succeed 
to long droughts ; if the mountains should again become 
clothed with forests, and great trees overshadow the shore 
and the plains of Aragua, we should more probably see the 
volume of the waters augment, and menace that beautiful 
cultivation which uow trenches on the basin of the lake. 
"While some of the cultivators of the valleys of Aragua 
fear the total disappearance of the lake, and others its re- 
turn to the banks it has deserted, we hear the question 
gravely discussed at Caracas, whether it would not be advis- 
able, in order to give greater extent to agriculture, to 
conduct the waters of tho lake into the llanos, by digriim a 
canal towards the Rio Pao. The possibility* of this enter- 
* The dividing ridge, namely, that which divides the waters between 
the valleys of Aragua and the Llanos, lowers so much towards the west of 
Guigue, as we have already observed, that there are ravines which conduc t 
the waters of the Caft.i de Cambury, the Rio Valencia, and the Guataparo 
'.n the time of floods, to the Rio Pao; but it would be easier to open a 
navigable canal from the lake of Valencia to the Orinoco, by the Pao the 
Portuguese, and the A pure, than to dig a draining eanal level with’ the 
bottom of the lake This bottom, according to the sounding, and mv 
barometric measurements, is 40 toises less than 222, or 182 above the 
surface of the ocean. On the road from Guigue to the Llanos, bv the 
table-land of La Villa de Cura, I found, to the south of the dividing 
