Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/33

 "Paraguay" says D. Pedro de Angelis (1810), "must be translated, the River running out of the lake Xarayes, celebrated for its wild rice. The derivation would be Para, sea, gua, of, and y, water."

"Paraguay," which in some old MSS. is written Paraquay, says Rengger, " is simply 'sea-water hole,' from Pará, the sea, and qua-y, water-hole."

"Paraguay," says popular opinion, "merely expresses water of the (celebrated) Payaguaor Canoe tribe of Indians, corrupted into Paragua by the first Spanish settlers."

"Paraguay," says Lieut. -Col. George Thompson, C.E., "is literally, 'the river pertaining to the sea' (Pará, the sea, gua, pertaining to, and y— pronounced ü—river or water)."

Colonel Thompson, I may here remark, is spoken of as an excellent Guarani scholar, and he has prepared for publication a vocabulary of that interesting moribund tongue.

An eighth derivation, for which there exists no authority, is "Water of the Penelope bird" (the Ortalida Parraqua, still common on its banks).

Without attempting to decide a question so disputed by authorities so respectable and so discrepant, I would observe, that even as late as 1837, a tribe of Guaranis had for chief one Paragua; that such names have been handed down amongst them from extreme antiquity; and that, both in Portuguese and in Spanish America, the conquerors often called geographical features after the caciques whom they debelled or slew. Paraguay therefore, may mean the river of (the kinglet) "Paragua."

It is not easy to treat of the topography and geography of Paraguay. Some portions,—for instance, the Paraguay river and the Parana to the parallel of Villa Rica, and even to the rapids of La Guayra—have for three centuries been travelled over and surveyed. On the other hand, the most tropical division of the Cordillera, which, running north