It is, however, useless to enter into this discussion, when the truth is, that, whether Buenos Ayres chooses or not to declare the navigation of the Paranã free, the people of Corrientes may rest assured it will never answer to the shipping of foreign nations to avail themselves of it:--foreigners will purchase the productions of Corrientes and of Paraguay if placed within their reach at low prices, but they will not unnecessarily incur the risks and expenses of sending their own ships a thousand miles up a river against wind and tide, in quest of a cargo which may at all times be had in the seaports of Brazil. Steam-communication will enable the Correntinos to compete with the Brazilians, and it is perhaps the only means by which they will be enabled to find any sale for their produce at such a rate as will make it worth the while of foreigners to seek for it, even in the market of Buenos Ayres. They have every facility for establishing it,--navigable rivers communicating with the farthest extremes of the republic,--and an endless abundance of wood of every kind for fuel. A remarkable physical feature in this province is the great lagoon of Ybera, extending in width about thirty leagues parallel to the course of the Paranã, from which it is supposed to derive its waters by some underground drainage, for no stream runs into it. Spreading far and wide to the south it occupies the enormous space of about a thousand square miles, and supplies four considerable rivers--the Mirinay, which runs into the Uruguay; and the Santa Lucia, the Bateles, and the Corrientes, which discharge themselves into the Paranã. It was Azara's opinion, from the general aspect of the country, that the Paranã itself at some former period took its course through this lake, and might again resume its ancient channel. At present it is hardly possible to explore any part of it from the prodigious quantity of aquatic plants and shrubs by which it is for the most part covered. What a store of lacustrine deposits is here forming for the examination of future geologists! Connected with this lake is the tradition, which has been handed down by early Spanish writers, of a nation of _pigmies_ who were said to have lived in islands in the midst of it, a tale which the first discoverers, who were generally as ignorant as they were brave, seem to have as implicitly believed as that a race of giants once occupied other parts of the same continent. Both tales are easily traceable to their true origin, and neither of them is without a plausible foundation.