United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If, to complete the sketch of the structure of the Andes from Tierra del Fuego to the northern Polar Sea, we pass the boundaries of South America, we find that the western Cordillera of New Grenada, after a great depression between the mouth of the Atrato and the gulf of Cupica, again rises in the isthmus of Panama to 80 or 100 toises high, augmenting towards the west, in the Cordilleras of Veragua and Salamanca,* and extending by Guatimala as far as the confines of Mexico.
"From the Bay of Cupica to the Gulf of Guayaquil," says M. Boussingault, "the country is covered with immense forest and traversed by numerous rivers; it rains there almost ceaselessly; and the mean temperature of this moist district scarcely reaches 78.8° F.... At Payta commence the sandy deserts of Priura and Sechura; to the constant humidity of Choco succeeds almost at once an extreme of dryness; and the mean temperature of the coast increases at the same time by 1.8° F." Even in this selected favourable instance it might be argued that the part performed in the change by the presence or absence of forest was comparatively small; there seems to have been, at the same time, an entire change of soil; and, in our present ignorance, it would be difficult to say by how much this of itself is able to affect the climate.
North of the isthmus of Cupica and of Panama, after an immense lowering, it assumes the appearance of a nearly central ridge, forming a rocky dyke that joins the great continent of North America to the southern continent. The low lands on the east of the Andes of Guatimala and New Spain appear to have been overwhelmed by the ocean and now form the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
The isthmus of Panama forms part of the territory of Columbia, and that neck of land, if traversed by good roads and stocked with camels, may one day serve as a portage for the commerce of the world, even though the plains of Cupica, the bay of Mandinga or the Rio Chagre should not afford the possibility of a canal for the passage of vessels proceeding from Europe to China,* or from the United States to the north-west coast of America.
The interior of Darfur is not more unknown to geographers than the humid, insalubrious forest-land which extends on the north-west of Betoi and the confluence of the Bevara with the Atrato, towards the isthmus of Panama. All that we positively know of it hitherto is that between Cupica and the left bank of the Atrato there is either a land-strait, or a total absence of the Cordillera.
Finally, the fourth branch of the Andes of Antioquia, situated westward of Zitara and the Rio Atrato, undergoes, long before it enters the isthmus of Panama, such a depression, that between the Gulf of Cupica and the embarcadero of the Rio Naipipi, we find only a plain across which M. Gogueneche has projected a canal for the junction of the two seas.
Word Of The Day