The longest stretch of low and comparatively level land to be found in the world extends through the center of South America. A boat starting from the Caribbean sea could sail up the Orinoco over a thousand miles, then down the Casquiare, which runs from the Orinoco into the Rio Negro, down that river to the Amazon, up the Amazon to the Madeira, then up that river and one of its branches through Brazil and Bolivia, and with a short portage of six and a half miles to one of the branches of the Paraguay, down the Paraguay and La Plata to the ocean.
The level land crosses the La Plata and continues southward through the Argentine Republic and Patagonia to the Straits of Magellan. Within this plain lie all the interior of Venezuela and Brazil, a part of Bolivia, all Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Argentine Republic. The pampas resemble our prairies, but run from north to south, while the prairies run from east to west.
The streams in the plain south of the valley of the La Plata rise in the Andes and flow southeastward to the Atlantic.
THE ABORIGINES.
The aborigines of America, except the Esquimaux, are unlike the natives of other countries; the most marked difference is in their language. They are divided into a number of tribes differing from each other in some respects, yet with manners, customs and religious beliefs generally similar.
In South America there are more than one hundred distinct languages, and two thousand dialects. About five or six million Indians have as many dialects as are found among the 800,000,000 inhabitants of Europe and Asia. Their languages are polysynthetic, being of a higher type than the agglutinative languages. In the polysynthetic tongue the substantive, adjective and verb are joined or combined, and oftentimes a whole sentence will be comprised in a single word.
The natives in the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon are forced to cultivate a little ground on the flood-plains, as the forests are thick and impenetrable. They live principally on the fruit of the palm (of which there are five hundred varieties), cocoa and bananas, fish and turtles. There are no roads or paths through the forests except the numerous channels of the rivers, called igarapes or furos. The tribes on the pampas live principally on game and wild cattle.
Humboldt tells us that the navigator on the Orinoco sees with surprise at night the palm trees illuminated by large fires. From the trunks of these trees are suspended the habitations of a tribe of Indians, who make their fires on mats hung in the air and filled with moist clay. The same palm tree furnishes also food and wine and clothing, and thus supplies every want and even the luxuries of life.
The Indian race as a whole is believed to be superior to both the negro and the Malay, as neither of those races has ever attained to the civilization of the Incas of Peru or of the Indians of Mexico and the Aztecs of Central America. Many of their myths and folk tales are common, not only to the Indians of one part of the country, but also to other tribes in distant parts of the continent, and even to the negroes of Africa, and the Arabs of upper Egypt. All the tribes on the continent have substantially the same habits of life, the same methods of warfare, the same general characteristics, and a language built substantially on the same plan.
From these observations it might seem that the Indian tribes of South America were allied to those of Africa or to the Malays, but on further consideration the similarity seems due rather to a like stage of civilization than to identity of race.