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Updated: May 14, 2025
Next the draining currents transformed into rivers, cut their way through the soil which formerly covered the table-lands and commenced their attrition upon the underlying continent of sandstone. It was a grinding which never ceased; every pebble and every bowlder which lay in the way was pressed into the endless labor; mountains were used up in channelling mountains.
On the right hand, heaved back grandly from the water-side, were the rocks and precipices, with their little table-lands of grass between; the sloping downs, and upward-rolling heath solitudes of the Isle of Man. On the left hand rose the craggy sides of the Islet of the Calf, here rent wildly into deep black chasms, there lying low under long sweeping acclivities of grass and heath.
This cause of injury to harbors it is not in man's power to resist by any means at present available; but, as we have seen, something can be done to prevent the degradation of high grounds, and to diminish the quantity of earth which is annually abstracted from the mountains, from table-lands, and from river-banks, to raise the bottom of the sea.
M. Boussingault, who passed through a part of the steppes of Venezuela long after me, is of opinion that the sandstone of the Llanos of San Carlos, that of the valley of San Antonio de Cucuta and the table-lands of Barquisimeto, Tocuyo, Merida and Truxillo belong to a formation of old red sandstone or coal. There is in fact real coal near Carache, south-west of the Paramo de las Rosas.
Most of the region where the buffaloes range consists of high upland prairies, such as in Asia are called "steppes," and in Mexico and South America "mesas," or "table-lands." Such plains are elevated from three to six thousand feet above the level of the sea.
Their sweating houses, as they call them, are small and close lodges, and the vapor is produced by water poured slowly upon red-hot stones. On passing the limits of O-push-y-e-cut's domains, the travellers left the elevated table-lands, and all the wild and romantic scenery which has just been described.
Let us picture to ourselves the appearance of this lake embosomed in the hollow of its hills in the far-off pastoral times, when the mountains and the high table-lands of Italy were the chosen territory of those tribes whose property consisted chiefly in their flocks.
The strata were flexured, folded, and often faulted and fissured along lines ranging north and south, the great fault of the Jordan-Arabah valley being the most important. At this period the mountains of the Lebanon, the table-lands of Judæa and of Arabia, formed of limestone, previously constituting the bed of the ocean during the Eocene and Cretaceous periods, were converted into land surfaces.
The reasons assigned for the disappearance of this race from Mexico after so large an importation of slaves as that which took place in the last century is the incongeniality of the climate of Mexico, particularly of the table-lands, to the negro constitution. At the breaking out of the Mexican revolution, almost the only negro slaves in the country were in the department of Vera Cruz.
This high land, which appears to be a continuation of the central table-lands of Brazil, stretches almost without interruption on the eastern side of the river down to its mouth at Santarem. The scenery as well as the soil, vegetation, and animal tenants of this region, are widely different from those of the flat and uniform country which borders the Amazons along most part of its course.
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