92 THREE DESCRIPTIONS OE PLAINS. 
Campos dos Parecis) the Andes of Peru, to the mountains 
of Brazil. It is the Cordillera of Chiquitos which widens in 
the Capitauia de Minas Gerties, and divides the rivers flowing 
into the Amazon from those of the Bio de la Plata,* not only 
in the interior of the country, in the meridian of Yilla Boa, 
but also at a few leagues from the coast, between Bio 
Janeiro and Bahia. t 
These three transverse chains, or rather these three groups 
of mountains stretching from west to east, within the 
limits of the torrid zone, are separated by tracts entirely 
level, the plains of Caracas, or of the Lower Orinoco ; the 
plains of the Amazon and the Bio Negro ; and the plains of 
Buenos Ayres, or of La Plata. I use the term plains, 
because the Lower Orinoco and the Amazon, far from 
flowing in a valley, form but a little furrow in the midst 
of a vast level. The tw r o basins, placed at the extremi- 
ties of South America, are savannahs or steppes, pasturage 
without trees; the intermediate basin, which receives the 
equatorial rains during the whole year, is almost entirely 
one vast forest, through which no other roads are known 
save the rivers. The strong vegetation which conceals the 
soil, renders also the uniformity of its level less perceptible ; 
and the -plains of Caracas and La Plata bear no other name. 
The three basins we have just described are called, in the 
language of the colonists, the Llanos of Varinas and of 
Caracas, the bosques or selvas (forests) of the Amazon, and 
the Pampas of Buenos Ayres. The trees not only for the 
most part cover the plains of the Amazon, from the Cor- 
dillera de Chiquitos, as far as that of Parime; they also 
crown these two chains of mountains, which rarely attain 
the height of the Pyrenees.J On this account, the vast 
plains of the Amazon, the Madeira, and the Bio Negro, are 
not so distinctly bounded as the Llanos of Caracas, and the 
* There is only a portage or carrying-place of 5,322 brapas between 
the Guapore (a branch of the Marmore and of the Madeira), and the B>° 
Aguapehy (a branch of the Jaura and of the Paraguay). 
t The Cordillera'of Chiquitos and of Brazil stretches toward the south- 
east, in the government of the Rio Grande, beyond the latitude of 30 
south. 
J We must except the most western part of the Cordillera of Chiquitos* 
between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra where the summit* 
