Unexplored in part, this wild waterway has a sinister reputation by reason of the disasters which have befallen the early attempts to navigate its waters. Its headwaters are in the Andes of Bolivia, in the region of Sucre and Potosi, and from thence to the edge of the Chaco the river falls 8,000 feet in 350 miles. It filters through a vast and dismal swamp a hundred miles across, and traverses numerous lagoons. Racing down the mountain slopes the Pilcomayo crosses the great plain of the Chaco and pours into the Paraguay River not far from the town of Asuncion. Many tributaries, many bifurcations, divide and lessen its current on its winding course, which at times wanders about in search of new channels, eroding and washing away the soil of the Pampas; a desolate and capricious stream. But one valuable asset of this and kindred waterways in the future, we may reflect, will be in the hydraulic power it is capable of furnishing, an asset indeed of value, to be developed some day, in a region where Nature has omitted to furnish motive power in the more accessible form of coalfields. Moreover, as this part of the continent becomes more settled under the growing exigencies of civilization, there is the valuable function of irrigation to be developed. A waterway of a very different character is the Uruguay River. We may trace its course for a thousand miles, from where its many headstreams flow down the slope of the Brazilian Serra do Mar, or maritime range, leaving which the river runs through beautiful country, open and hilly, for a long distance. Great cataracts interrupt the course, and, in places, contracted in width between deep, thickly wooded banks, the stream is of great depth, and its waters, flowing over a sandstone bottom, are generally clear, with little silt. It is subject to heavy floods by reason of the rains in its upper basin, which at times submerge the rocks which obstruct its current. But, apart from its upper reaches, broad and full-flowing, the Uruguay encircles the Republic whose name it bears on its western side, and, falling into the Plate, affords, in conjunction with the sea, a water-frontage on three sides of the State, and is navigable for 200 miles from its mouth as far as the towns of Salta and Paysandu. Many hundreds of miles of the river are navigable in smaller craft, affording valuable waterways for the inhabitants on its banks. The enormous quantity of water of this great fluvial system, pouring into the Plate, give that estuary a greater volume than the great Mississippi. At its mouth the Plate is 138 miles wide, and opposite Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, its bosom is still 57 miles broad, whilst, narrowing, it is 25 miles across at the confluence of the Paraná and Uruguay.