slaughtered forty-eight, and sold the children at the rate of three or
four pounds apiece.
October 5th.--We crossed the Parana to St. Fe Bajada, a town on the
opposite shore. The passage took some hours, as the river here
consisted of a labyrinth of small streams, separated by low wooded
islands. I had a letter of introduction to an old Catalonian Spaniard,
who treated me with the most uncommon hospitality. The Bajada is the
capital of Entre Rios. In 1825 the town contained 6000 inhabitants,
and the province 30,000; yet, few as the inhabitants are, no province
has suffered more from bloody and desperate revolutions. They boast
here of representatives, ministers, a standing army, and governors: so
it is no wonder that they have their revolutions. At some future day
this must be one of the richest countries of La Plata. The soil is
varied and productive; and its almost insular form gives it two grand
lines of communication by the rivers Parana and Uruguay.
I was delayed here five days, and employed myself in examining the
geology of the surrounding country, which was very interesting. We
here see at the bottom of the cliffs, beds containing sharks' teeth and
sea-shells of extinct species, passing above into an indurated marl,
and from that into the red clayey earth of the Pampas, with its
calcareous concretions and the bones of terrestrial quadrupeds. This
vertical section clearly tells us of a large bay of pure salt-water,
gradually encroached on, and at last converted into the bed of a muddy
estuary, into which floating carcasses were swept. At Punta Gorda, in
Banda Oriental, I found an alternation of the Pampaean estuary deposit,
with a limestone containing some of the same extinct sea-shells; and
this shows either a change in the former currents, or more probably an
oscillation of level in the bottom of the ancient estuary. Until
lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an
estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth
of the existing great river the Plata, and the presence of so many
bones of terrestrial quadrupeds: but now Professor Ehrenberg has had
the kindness to examine for me a little of the red earth, taken from
low down in the deposit, close to the skeletons of the mastodon, and he
finds in it many infusoria, partly salt-water and partly fresh-water
forms, with the latter rather preponderating; and therefore, as he
remarks, the water must have been brackish. M. A. d'Orbigny found on
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