ts northern
frontier, which extract the moisture from the north-east trades and
leave the Brazilian plateau behind them with a very limited rainfall,
except near the Atlantic coast. The more arid districts offer no
inducement for settlement and are inhabited only by a few roving bands
of Indians, but there were settlements of whites in the grazing
districts of the Rio Branco at an early date, and a few hundreds of
adventurers have occupied the mining districts of the east. In
general, Brazilian Guiana, as this plateau region is sometimes called,
is one of the least attractive parts of the republic.

The great Brazilian plateau, which is the most important physical
division of Brazil, consists of an elevated tableland 1000 to 3000 ft.
above the sea-level, traversed by two great mountain systems, and
deeply eroded and indented by numerous rivers. A thick sandstone sheet
once covered the greater part if not all of it, remains of which are
found on the elevated _chapadas_ of the interior and on isolated
elevations extending across the republic toward its western frontier.
These chapadas and elevations, which are usually described as mountain
ranges, are capped by horizontal strata of sandstone and show the
original surface, which has been worn away by the rivers, leaving here
and there broad flat-topped ridges between river basins and narrower
ranges of hills between river courses. From the valleys their rugged,
deeply indented escarpments, stretching away to the horizon, have the
appearance of a continuous chain of mountains. The only true mountain
systems, however, so far as known, are the two parallel ranges which
follow the contour of the coast, and the central, or Goyana, system.
The first consists of an almost continuous range crossing the northern
end of Rio Grande do Sul and following the coast northward to the
vicinity of Cape Frio, and thence northward in broken ranges to the
vicinity of Cape St Roque, and a second parallel range running from
eastern Sao Paulo northeast and north to the eastern margin of the Sao
Francisco basin in northern Bahia, where that river turns eastward to
the Atlantic. The first of these is generally known as the Serra do
Mar, or Coast Range, though it is locally known under many names. Its
culminating point is in the Organ Mountains (Serra dos Orgaos), near
Rio de Janeiro, which reaches an elevation of 7323 ft. The inla