"In Santa Catharina and Rio Grande enormous eruptions of basaltic rocks have covered a portion of the plateau. The basalt has even reached the seaboard, and southward of the island on which Desterro is built it overlies the granites of the Serra do Mar. The south flank of the plateau, which overlooks the prairies of Rio Grande, is also basaltic. The popular judgment has gone astray, having given the same name--the Serra Geral--to the granitic chain and to the edge of the basaltic overflow, as if one were a continuation of the other. "If we except the prairies of Rio Grande, where the pampas of the Argentine and of Uruguay commence, there is nothing in front of the Serra do Mar but a narrow sandy waste. The rains which scar the face of the _serra_, wearing it into ravines, do not irrigate it sufficiently; and the rivers, of little volume, are spent in slowly filling the marshes that border the coast; they are lost finally among the granite islets, in the deep bays which the first explorers insisted were great estuaries. From the Rio Grande to Espirito Santo the Parahyba is the only river that has been able to deposit, at the foot of the _serra_, and around its outlets, a solid and fertile alluvial plain; it is there that the sugar-mills of Campos are established. "It is the vegetation above all that gives the various regions of Brazil their peculiar character. It is a mistake to suppose that Brazil is entirely covered with forests. The forests are concentrated upon two regions: the basin of the Amazon and a long strip of seaboard along the Atlantic coast between Espiritu Santo and Rio Grande. The forests require abundant rains; and the Serra do Mar, receiving the humidity of the ocean winds upon its dripping flanks, incessantly hidden by mists, produces far to the south the conditions which have made the Amazonian basin the home of the equatorial forest. For a distance of 1,200 miles those who have landed at the various practicable inlets have found everywhere on the slopes of the _serra_ the same splendid and impenetrable forest. Even to-day it is almost untouched. It encircles and embraces Rio; it seems to refuse it room for growth, as in the tale of Daudet's, in which the forest reconquered in a single springtide the land which the intrepid colonists had stolen from it in order to found their settlement.