masses, covered with cacti and mimosa-trees. The real grandeur,
however, of an immense river like this, is derived from reflecting how
important a means of communication and commerce it forms between one
nation and another; to what a distance it travels, and from how vast a
territory it drains the great body of fresh water which flows past your
feet.
For many leagues north and south of San Nicolas and Rozario, the
country is really level. Scarcely anything which travellers have
written about its extreme flatness, can be considered as exaggeration.
Yet I could never find a spot where, by slowly turning round, objects
were not seen at greater distances in some directions than in others;
and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, a person's
eye being six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is two
miles and four-fifths distant. In like manner, the more level the
plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow
limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which
one would have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed.
October 1st.--We started by moonlight and arrived at the Rio Tercero by
sunrise. The river is also called the Saladillo, and it deserves the
name, for the water is brackish. I stayed here the greater part of the
day, searching for fossil bones. Besides a perfect tooth of the
Toxodon, and many scattered bones, I found two immense skeletons near
each other, projecting in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff of
the Parana. They were, however, so completely decayed, that I could
only bring away small fragments of one of the great molar teeth; but
these are sufficient to show that the remains belonged to a Mastodon,
probably to the same species with that, which formerly must have
inhabited the Cordillera in Upper Peru in such great numbers. The men
who took me in the canoe, said they had long known of these skeletons,
and had often wondered how they had got there: the necessity of a
theory being felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha,
the mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal! In the evening we rode
another stage, and crossed the Monge, another brackish stream, bearing
the dregs of the washings of the Pampas.
October 2nd.--We passed through Corunda, which, from the luxuriance of
its gardens, was one of the prettiest villages I saw. From this point
to St. Fe the road is not very safe. The western side of the Parana
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