A great historical interest attaches to this part of the highland, and more particularly to the country round the Lake of Timpanogos, which is perhaps the same with the Lake of Teguayo, the ancestral seat of the Aztecs. In their migration from Aztlan to Tula, and to the Valley of Tenochtitlan (Mexico), this people made three halting places or stations, at which the ruins of the Casas grandes are still to be seen. The first sojourn of the Aztecs was at the Lake of Teguayo, the second on the Rio Gila, and the third not far from the Presidio de Llanos. Lieutenant Abert found on the banks of the Gila the same immense number of fragments of pottery ornamented with painting, and scattered over a considerable tract of ground, which had astonished the missionaries Francisco Garces and Pedro Fonte in that locality. These remains of the products of human skill are supposed to indicate the existence of a former higher civilisation in these now solitary regions. Remains of buildings in the singular style of architecture of the Aztecs, and of their houses of seven stories, are also found far to the eastward of the Rio Grande del Norte; for example, in Taos. (Compare Abert’s Examination of New Mexico, in the Documents of Congress, No. 41, pp. 489 and 581–605, with my Essai pol. T. ii. pp. 241–244.) The Sierra Nevada of California is parallel to the Coast of the Pacific; but between the latitudes of 34° and 41°, between San Buenaventura and the Bay of Trinidad, there runs, on the West of the Sierra Nevada, another (smaller) coast chain, of which Monte del Diablo, 3448 French, 3674 English feet high, is the culminating point. In the narrow valley, between this coast chain and the great Sierra Nevada, flow from the south the Rio de San Joaquin, and from the north the Rio del Sacramento, on the banks of which, in rich alluvial soil, are the rich gold-washings now so much resorted to.

I have already referred, p. [43], to a hypsometric levelling, and to barometric measurements made from the junction of the Kanzas River with the Missouri to the Pacific, or throughout the immense extent of 28 degrees of longitude. Dr. Wislizenus has now successfully continued the levelling began by me from the city of Mexico, in the Equinoctial Zone, to the North as far as Santa Fé del Nuevo Mexico, in lat. 35° 38′. It will be seen, perhaps, with surprise, that the elevated plain which forms the broad crest of the Mexican Andes is far from sinking down, as had long been supposed, to an inconsiderable height. I give here for the first time, according to the measurements which we at present possess, the elevations of several points, forming a line of levelling from the city of Mexico to Santa Fé, which latter town is less than four German (sixteen English) geographical miles from the Rio del Norte.

French Feet.Eng. Feet.Observer.
Mexico70087490Ht.
Tula63186733Ht.
San Juan del Rio60906490Ht.
Queretaro59706363Ht.
Celaya56466017Ht.
Salamanca54065761Ht.
Guanaxuato64146836Ht.
Silao55465910Br.
Villa de Leon57556133Br.
Lagos59836376Br.
Aguas Calientes58756261Br.
San Luis Potosi57146090Br.
Zacatecas75448040Br.
Fresnillo67977244Br.
Durango64266848(Oteiza)
Parras46784985Ws.
Saltillo49175240Ws.
El Bolson de Mapimi3600 to 42003837 to 4476Ws.
Chihuahua43524638Ws.
Cosiquiariachi58866273Ws.
Passo del Norte, on the Rio Grande del Norte35573812Ws.
Santa Fé del Nuevo Mexico66127047Ws.

The letters Ws., Br., and Ht., are placed to distinguish the barometric measurements of Dr. Wislizenus, Oberbergrath Burkart, and my own. Wislizenus has appended to his valuable memoir three vertical sections of the surface of the ground: one from Santa Fé to Chihuahua by Passo del Norte; one from Chihuahua to Reynosa by Parras; and one from Fort Independence (a little to the east of the Confluence of the Missouri and the Kanzas River) to Santa Fé. The calculation is founded on daily corresponding observations of the barometer, made by Engelmann at St. Louis, and by Lilly at New Orleans. If we consider that the difference of latitude between Santa Fé and Mexico is 16° and that thus (apart from deviations from a straight line) the distance in the north and south direction is above 960 geographical miles, we are led to inquire whether there be in any other part of the whole globe a similar conformation of the Earth, equal in extent and elevation (between 5000 and 7000 French, or 5330 and 7460 English feet above the level of the sea) to the highland of which I have just given the levelling, and yet over which four-wheeled waggons can travel as they do from Mexico to Santa Fé. It is formed by the broad, undulating, flattened crest of the chain of the Mexican Andes, and is not the swelling of a valley between two mountain chains, as is the case in some other remarkable elevations of plain or undulating surface—in the Northern Hemisphere, in the “Great Basin” between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada of California,—in the Southern Hemisphere, in the high plain of the lake of Titicaca, between the eastern and western chains of the Andes of Bolivia,—and in Asia, in the highlands of Thibet, between the Himalaya and the Kuen-lün.

GENERAL SUMMARY
OF THE
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

Preface to the First Edition—p. [vii]. to p. [ix].

Preface to the Second and Third Editions—p. [xi]. to p. [xv].

Note by the Translator—p. [xvii].

Steppes and Deserts—p. [1] to p. [26].

Coast chain and mountain valleys of Caraccas. Lake of Tacarigua. Contrast in respect to the luxuriance of vegetation between those districts and the treeless plains. The steppe regarded as the bottom of a Mediterranean Sea; broken strata a little higher than the rest of the plain called “banks.” General phenomena of extensive plains; the Heaths of Europe, the Pampas and Llanos of South America, the African Deserts, and the Steppes of Northern Asia. Different characters of the vegetable covering of the surface. Animal life. Pastoral nations, and their invasive migrations [1]–[6]