DISCOURSE

volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and sometimes even the mere force of the sea waters are sufficient to tear the earth apart in this way, and violently separate men whom interest constantly tends to reunite.

This observation applies particularly to the Southern Continent; the Land of Fire Tierra del Fuego takes its name from its volcanoes: this region also—
between this last Cape and the corresponding shore of America. One sees, by the appearance of the coasts, that they were separated with violence, and the Islands, which are between the two, form a kind of chain like the Maldives. The inhabitants of America corresponding to the Eastern extremity of Asia are of small stature, tanned, and have little beard, like the Kamchadals Indigenous people of the Kamchatka Peninsula, etc. See the proofs of this opinion in the work of Krasheninnikov Stepan Krasheninnikov, a Russian explorer of Siberia and Kamchatka himself, translated in the second quarto volume of the Journey to Siberia by Abbot Chappe. These proofs are too strong to serve only as support for a system.

PRELIMINARY.

—as well as the Land of the States Staten Island, Argentina seems entirely composed of inaccessible rocks, suspended almost without a base, surrounded by frightful abysses, and crowned with eternal snow. On the other hand, a few leagues from the spot on the Great Malouine Island Falkland Islands where Mr. de Bougainville Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French explorer who established the first settlement on the Falklands landed, one sees by the position of the mountains, by the crevices encountered there, and by the disorder of the beds of freestone freestone: fine-grained stone that can be easily cut in any direction, that this country only became an island through the force of an earthquake (k);

(k) "Another motive still engages me to believe that the Malouine Islands formerly belonged to the Land of the Patagonians. One sees no trees on the Malouine Islands, and the entire East coast of the Patagonians, and of the Land of Fire, is devoid of them until about 25 leagues inland, where one begins..."