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In that part of the Sierra Parime which M. Bonpland and myself visited, gneiss forms a less marked zone, and oscillates more frequently towards granite than mica-slate. I found no garnets in the gneiss of Parime. There is no doubt that the gneiss-granite of the Orinoco is slightly auriferous on some points.
I call this chain the Cordillera of Parime, or of the great cataracts of the Orinoco. It may be followed for a length of two hundred and fifty leagues; but it is less a chain, than a collection of granitic mountains, separated by small plains, without being everywhere disposed in lines.
The chain of Sipapo forms the south-west limit of the system of mountains of Parime, between 70 1/2 and 68 degrees of longitude. Modem geologists have observed that the culminant points of a group are less frequently found at its centre than towards one of its extremities, preceding, and announcing in some sort, a great depression* of the chain.
Sometimes they are in masses with irregular forms, in which upheavings seem to have taken place as on a labyrinth of crevices or a heap of veins, as for example in the Sierra Parime and the Serra dos Vertentes.
The height of the northern and southern banks is generally less than 500 or 600 toises. It is somewhat extraordinary that the maximum of the depression of the basin is not in its centre, but on its southern limit, at the Sierra Parime. The partition ridge of this basin is formed by small table-lands, known by the names of Mesas de Amana, Guanipa and Jonoro.
This is the place to make known, in order to complete the description of the Orinoco, the principal results of my researches on El Dorado, the White Sea, or Laguna Parime, and the sources of the Orinoco, as they are marked in the most recent maps.
We have just examined the southern part of the vast system of the mountains of Parime, between 2 and 4 degrees of latitude, and between the meridians of the sources of the Orinoco and the Essequibo. The development of this system of mountains northward between the chain of Pacaraina and Rio Cuyuni, and between the meridians 66 and 61 3/4 degrees, is still less known.
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