e risen and set upon these sculptured forms, though
geologically recent, casting the same line of shadows century after
century. A long succession of brute races roamed over the mountains and
plains of South America, and died out ages ere man was created. In those
pre-Adamite times, long before the Incas ruled, the mastodon and
megatherium, the horse and the tapir, dwelt in the high valley of Quito;
yet all these passed away before the arrival of the aborigines: the wild
horses now feeding on the pampas of Buenos Ayres were imported from
Europe three hundred and thirty-three years ago.[50]

[Footnote 50: At Paita, the most western point of South America, there
is a raised beach three hundred feet high. The basal slate and sandstone
rocks, dipping S. of E., are covered by conglomerate, sand, and a
gypseous formation, containing shells of living species. Additional to
those described by D'Orbigny we found here _Cerithium laeviuscula_,
_Ostrea gallus_, and _Ampullina Ortoni_, as determined by W.M. Gabb,
Esq., of Philadelphia. Darwin found shells in Chile 1300 feet above the
sea, covered with marine mud. President Loomis, of Lewisburg University,
Pa., informs the writer, that in 1853, after nearly a day's ride from
Iquique, he came to a former sea-beach. "It furnished abundant specimens
of _Patellae_ and other shells, still perfect, and identical with others
that I had that morning obtained at Iquique with the living animal
inhabiting them." This beach is elevated 2500 feet above the Pacific.
The same observer says that near Potosi there is one uninterrupted mass
of lava, having a columnar structure, not less than one hundred miles in
length, fifty miles wide, and eight hundred feet thick. It overlies a
bed of saliferous sandstone which has been worked for salt. Fifty feet
within a mine, and in the undisturbed rock which forms its roof, the
doctor found fragments of dicotyledonous trees with the bark on,
undecomposed, uncharred, and fibrous.]

And now the Andes[51] stand complete in their present gigantic
proportions, one of the grandest and most symmetrical mountain chains in
the world. Starting from the Land of Fire, it stretches northward and
mounts upward until it enters the Isthmus of Panama, where it bows
gracefully to either ocean, but soon resumes, under another name, its
former majesty, and loses its magnificence only where the trappers chase
the fur-bearing animals over the Arctic plains. Nowhere else does Nature