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83 of Paraguay, Tucuman, and Buenos-Ayres, by another desert having an extent of four hundred leagues.

Its lands, like all those of the new world, do not present, at the epoch of its discovery, to the view of the attentive and impartial observer, any thing beside a steril, arid, and ungrateful soil, which constantly baffled the expectations of those who cultivated it with the greatest diligence. The earliest Europeans who endeavoured to form an establishment in Peru, were, without exception, tormented by hunger and necessity, and reduced to the sad condition of toiling for the benefit of those by whom they were to be succeeded. This failure was inevitable in an immense uncultivated territory, left to its own fecundity, and abounding alone in that multiplicity of wild plants and productions, which vegetation drew from a soil never corrected by industry.

The native Americans being ignorant of the use of implements of iron, and possessing neither the ox, the horse, nor the ass, it was impossible that the effects of agriculture should be generally extended over a soil covered with forests, and with pools and lakes, the stagnant waters of which exhaled in the atmosphere the principles of putrefaction.

The most ancient and best founded observations afford us the information, that in the centre even of the torrid zone, the earth was so cold at the depth of six or seven inches, that the