It is far up in the interior where the great mass of this mighty forest is found; not on the lower part of the river, near the coast as is generally supposed. Bounded on one side by the Andes, on the other by the Atlantic, it extends from east to west for a distance of 2,600 miles; and from 7 N. latitude on the banks of the Orinoco, to 18 S. latitude on the northern slope of the great mountain chain of Bolivia, a distance of more than 1,700 miles. From a point about sixty miles south-east of Tabatinga, on the Upper Amazons, a circle may be drawn of 1,100 miles in diameter, the whole area of which will be virgin forest. Such are the magnificent proportions of these wonderful woods, which speak to the imagination as forcibly as the ocean or the Great Sahara. The forests of no other part of the world, not even the immense fir-woods of Siberia or of North America, are so extensive and unbroken as this. Those of Central Europe are trifling in comparison, nor in India are they very continuous or extensive. Africa contains some large forests situated on the east and west coasts, and in the interior south of the Equator, but the whole of them would bear but a small proportion to that of the Amazons. In a general survey of the tropical world, we may, therefore, look upon South America as pre-eminently the land of forests, contrasting strongly with Asia or Africa, where deserts are the most characteristic features. If the Nile--so remarkable for its historical recollections, which carry us far back into the by-gone ages--and the Thames, unparalleled by the greatness of a commerce which far eclipses that of ancient Carthage or Tyre--may justly be called _the_ rivers of the _past_ and the _present_, the Amazons has equal claims to be called the stream of the _future_; for a more splendid field nowhere lies open to the enterprise of man. All the gifts of Nature are scattered in profusion over the vast territory drained by the river. The mountains, where it rises, teem with mineral treasures, and the very ideal of fertility is realised in those well-watered plains, where the equatorial sun developes life in boundless luxuriance. The most useful and costly productions of the tropical world,--sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, tobacco, maize, rice; quinquina in the higher regions of the Marañon, where wheat and the vine find a congenial climate; cacao and vanille, sarsaparilla and caoutchouc, various palms of the most manifold uses; trees and shrubs, some rivalling our oaks in the solidity of their timber, others fit by the beauty of their grain to adorn palaces; dyes, resins, gums, spices, drugs,--all, in one word, that is capable of satisfying the wants of the frugal or the fancies of the rich, might there be raised in profusion over a space surpassing England at least forty times in extent. The whole actual population of the globe could easily live in content and plenty in the almost uninhabited valleys of the Marañon and its tributary streams.