The rivers, with their countless lateral arms, afford the only routes by which the country can be traversed. Between the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, astronomical observations, and where these were wanting, determinations by compass of the direction of the rivers, respectively shewed us that two lonely mission villages might be only a few miles apart, and yet that the monks when they wished to visit each other could only do so by spending a day and a half in following the windings of small streams, in canoes hollowed out of the trunks of trees. A striking evidence of the impenetrability of particular parts of the forest is afforded by a trait related by an Indian of the habits of the large American tiger, or panther-like jaguar. While in the Llanos of Varinas and the Meta, and in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, the introduction of European cattle, horses, and mules has enabled the beasts of prey to find an abundant subsistence,--so that since the first discovery of America their numbers have increased exceedingly in those extended and treeless grassy steppes,--their congeners in the dense forests around the sources of the Orinoco lead a very different and far less easy life. In a bivouac near the junction of the Cassiquiare with the Orinoco we had had the misfortune of losing a large dog, to which we were much attached, as the most faithful and affectionate companion of our wanderings. Being still uncertain whether he had been actually killed by the tigers, a faint hope of recovering him induced us, in returning from the mission of Esmeralda through the swarms of musquitoes by which it is infested, to spend another night at the spot where we had so long sought him in vain. We heard the cries of the jaguar, probably the very individual which we suspected of the deed, extremely near to us; and as the clouded sky made astronomical observations impossible, we passed part of the night in making our interpreter (lenguaraz) repeat to us the accounts given by our native boat’s crew of the tigers of the country.