The Uruguay River, which flows into the La Plata almost opposite Buenos Aires, is one thousand miles long and is navigable for several hundred miles, the Paraná for almost two thousand miles, and the Paraguay, from its junction with the latter stream, floats boats of shallow draft for fifteen hundred miles farther. Altogether these various streams furnish thousands of miles of navigable waters on which regular communication is furnished by large and commodious steamers. Nicolas Mihanovitch is the undisputed king of this river traffic, and dozens of vessels plying on these rivers bear the white letter M. with a black background on the funnel. They furnish a nightly service between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and weekly or semi-weekly service up the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers. Vessels drawing sixteen feet of water can proceed as far as Rosario, but ocean-going steamers seldom ascend any farther, as the water becomes shallower beyond that city. Boats of twelve feet draught can proceed as far as Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, eight hundred miles farther inland. The waters carry much mud, and the channel sometimes changes its course by the formation of mud banks. Hundreds of islands have formed, some of which probably started from a submerged tree, about which the sediment was deposited. In truth the Paraná plays with islands and sand banks as a lesser stream does with pebbles. A recent scientific writer has given some interesting facts concerning its eccentricities. Says he: “A schooner which sank nine years ago off La Paz swiftly developed at its tail an island a mile long, now crowned by willows. My photograph of the old port of Paraná town in 1902 shows an island eight hundred and eighty yards long by four hundred and ninety feet wide fronting it; in December, 1907, only one hundred and sixty feet of the island remained. Thirty years ago a market gardener made a shallow ditch cut-off opposite Ibicuy River (Lower Paraná), to take his produce down the river. The Paraná elected to take his work in hand, and now ocean steamers pass through this channel on their way down from Rosario.” In the rainy season the Paraná spreads out for dozens of miles over the level land and forms an inland sea so wide that the banks are almost invisible. This flood season lasts for three months in the year, generally from March to June. At this season the Paraguay pours a mass of water twenty miles wide and twenty feet deep into the Paraná. Added to this is the water of the Alta Paraná, and the Lower Paraná then spreads itself out over the low lands of the western bank. “Shallow, disreputable, vast, It sprawls across the western plains,”