in return, it affords other advantages, which are not only able to keep up the balance, but also to give a preponderance to the side of the territory. For the architecture of this Cordillera appears to be altogether distinct from that which Nature displays in the organization of the rest of the globe; or, rather, it is its design and completion. Divided into two parts, it composes as many worlds, the one high, the other low, in which, as has already been said, is united whatever distinguishes Africa from Asia, and both of them conjointly from Europe.
The high world occupies the ground which separates the two above-mentioned chains of mountains, the summits of which are distant from each other, ten, twenty, and, in some instances, fifty leagues. It indeed happens that in some places they meet and unite, by the interposition of a third Cordillera, which runs east and west. Such is that of Asuay and Moxanda, in the kingdom of Quito[1]. Notwithstanding its
- ↑ Father Amrich, in his complete history, in manuscript, of the missions to the
declivities of the southern mountains, and of the insalubrity of the summits of the Cordillera, it would be impossible to people and cultivate them, we can venture to assert that, even if it were practicable to execute both, the curvatures, declivities, and hollows of the mountains would not add one handful of useful soil to that which their bases would afford, if they did not exist. This proposition, paradoxical as it may appear, is an incontestible truth, since all the trees which are planted on the convex superficies of a mountain have to stand perpendicularly to the horizon, and must consequently have, on the horizontal base, as many points of correspondence and support as they occupy in the mountain. Hence it results that, the space which the plane affords being already filled up, nothing more can be planted or sown in all the unequal surfaces of the mountain by which it is occupied. It is equally demonstrable, that a mountainous territory can contain no more houses or inhabitants than the base it occupies, supposing it levelled.
