South America: Observations and Impressions New edition corrected and revised

Whether it is well to rejoice that the population of our planet has grown so fast during the last century, even as the inhabitants of a city rejoice when a decennial census reve...

From Cuzco, the oldest of South American cities, with its mingled memories of an Indian and a Spanish past, I will ask the reader to follow me to a land of ancient silence where...

None of the countries of South America, except Chile, has been demarcated by Nature from its neighbour; it is to historical events that they owe their present boundaries. This i...

Except Egypt, there is not in the world a country so strangely formed as Chile. Egypt is seven hundred miles long and nowhere save in the Delta more than twelve miles wide. Chil...

Bolivia was for two centuries after the Spanish Conquest a part of Peru and has neither natural boundaries nor any distinctive physical character to mark it off from its neighbo...

The first part of the voyage from Panama down the coast towards Peru is enjoyable when made in a steamer, for the sea is smooth, the southerly breeze is usually light, and after...

South America is bounded at its northern end by an isthmus and at its southern by a strait. They are the two gateways by which the western side of the Continent, cut off from th...

Alexander Hamilton bade his fellow citizens to think continentally; and Herodotus, in the short introduction prefixed to his history, explains its theme as being an account of t...

For more than two thousand miles the republics of Argentina and Chile are divided from one another by the gigantic barrier of the Andes. So great is the continuous elevation of...

In the annals of maritime discovery three great voyages stand out as the most daring in their inception, the most striking in their incidents, the most momentous in their result...

The interest which Argentina arouses is entirely unlike that which appeals to the traveller's eye and mind in Peru or Bolivia or Chile. In each of these three countries there is...

Although races, unlike in character and differing in the scale of upward progress, must have come into contact from the earliest times, it is only in recent years that the pheno...

changing their leaves not all at the same time, like the deciduous trees of temperate countries, but each tree at its own time, so that there are always some with fresh leaves c...

In A.D. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Liberator of Spanish America, moved his armies into Spain, the dominions of the Spanish Crown stretched south eight thousand mile...

It is not my purpose to describe or discuss either the political institutions or the practical politics of the South American states. Even with a fuller knowledge of them than I...

That more than half of South America was settled by and still belongs to the men of Portugal is due to what may be called an historical accident. In the year following the disco...

Whoever wishes to have something by which to distinguish Uruguay from its many sister republics, the size and character of each of which are unfamiliar to many of us in Europe,...

Whoever read as a boy the books of old travellers in the Andes, such as Humboldt's _Aspects of Nature_, or pored over such accounts of the primitive American peoples as are give...