Chains of mountains, nearly parallel, extend from south-west to north-east, 700 miles along the base of the triangle, with a breadth of about 400 miles. Of these, the Sierra de Mar, or the “coast-chain,” reaches from the river Uruguay to Cape San Roque, never more distant than 20 miles from the Atlantic, except to the south of the bay of Santos, where it is 80. Offsets diverge to the right and left; the granitic peaks of the Corcovado and Tejuco, which form such picturesque objects in that most magnificent of panoramas the bay of Rio de Janeiro, are the ends of one. The parallel chain of Espenhaço, beginning near the town of San Paolo, and the continuous chains of the Serro Frio, and forming the western boundary of the basin of the Rio San Francisco, is the highest in Brazil, one of its mountains, Itambe, being 8426 feet above the sea. All the mountains in Brazil have a general tendency from S.W. to N.E., except the transverse chain of the Sierra dos Vertentes, which begins 60 miles south of Villa Rica, and runs in a tortuous line to its termination near the junction of the Mamore and Beni. It forms the watershed of the tributaries of the San Francisco and Amazons on the north, and those of the Rio de la Plata on the south; its greatest height is 3500 feet above the sea: its western part, the Sierra Parecis, is merely a succession of detached hills. This chain, the coast-chain of Venezuela, and the mountains of Parima, are the only ranges in the continent of America that do not entirely, or in some degree, lie in the direction of the meridians. Magnificent forests of tall trees, bound together by tangled creeping and parasitical plants, clothe the declivities of the mountains and line the borders of the Brazilian rivers, where the soil is rich and the verdure brilliant. Many of the plains on the table-land bear a coarse nutritious grass after the rains only, others forests of dwarf trees; but vast undulating tracts are always verdant with excellent pasture intermixed with fields of corn: some parts are bare sand and rolled quartz, and the Campos Parecis, north of the Sierre dos Vertentes, in the province of Matto Grosso, is a sandy desert of unknown extent, similar to the Great Gobi on the table-land of Tibet. CHAPTER IX. The Low Lands of South America—Desert of Patagonia—The Pampas of Buenos Ayres—The Silvas of the Amazons—The Llanos of the Orinoco and Venezuela—Geological Notice.