impenetrable forests, it has not even now been properly placed upon the map. Bourgade la Dardye inclines to think he was the first to visit it since the expedition sent by the elder Lopez, President of Paraguay, under Lieutenant Patiño in 1861. Before that time it had been left unvisited since 1788, when the Boundary Commissioners sent to determine the dividing line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions camped near it for a week. Felix de Azara writes about it in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’,[88] but he does little more than reproduce the account given by the Boundary Commissioners. He places it in 24° 4′ 27″ lat., and refers to it as ‘a tremendous precipice of water[89] worthy of Homer or of Virgil’s pen.’ He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a balcony or window (_como por un balcon ó ventana_), but by an inclined plane at an inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the top of the falls is about four thousand nine hundred Castilian yards in breadth, and suddenly narrows to about seventy yards, and rushes over the fall with such terrific violence as if it wished to ‘displace the centre of the earth, and cause thus the nutation which astronomers have observed in the earth’s axis.’ The dew or vapour which rises from the fall is seen in the shape of a column from many miles away, and on it hangs a perpetual rainbow, which trembles as the earth seems to tremble under one’s feet. ‘The noise,’ he says, ‘is heard full six leagues off, and in the neighbourhood neither bird nor beast is found.’ In Azara’s time the journey was not too pleasant, for he says: ‘He who wishes to see this fall must cross the desert for thirty leagues from the town of Curuguaty to the river Guatimi. There he must choose trees to construct canoes. In these he must embark all those who go with him, arms and provisions, and besides, where he embarks, leave an armed escort to secure his base of supplies from the wild Indians’ attack. In the canoes he then must navigate the Guatimi for thirty leagues until it joins the Paraná, and always with much care, for in the woods upon its banks are Indians who give no quarter.[90] . . . Then there remain three leagues to sail upon the Paraná, then one can reach the falls either in the canoes or struggling along the woods which fringe the river’s bank.’ Azara was, perhaps, of all the travellers of the last century, the man who above all things shines in accuracy, and in point of fact his description of the cataract is the best we have up to the present time. Bourgade la Dardye tells us that not far above the cataract the Paraná expands into a lake almost five miles in breadth, and from the lake the river issues in two great arms, which have forced their way through the mountains known as the Sierra de Mbaracyu.