dollars, an increase of one million over 1866.

The early expeditions into the Valley of the Amazon, in search of the
"Gilded King," are the most romantic episodes in the history of Spanish
discovery. To the wild wanderings of these worshipers of gold succeeded
the more earnest explorations of the Jesuits, those pioneers of
geographical knowledge. Pinzon discovered the mouth of the river in
1500; but Orellana, who came down the Napo in 1541, was the first to
navigate its waters. Twenty years later Aguirre descended from Cuzco; in
1637, Texeira ascended to Quito by the Napo; Cabrera descended from Peru
in 1639; Juan de Palacios by the Napo in 1725; La Condamine from Jaen in
1744, and Madame Godin by the Pastassa in 1769. The principal travelers
who preceded us in crossing the continent this century were Mawe (1828),
Poeppig (1831), Smyth (1834), Von Tschudi (1845), Castelnau (1846),
Herndon and Gibbon (1851), and Marcoy (1867), who came down through
Peru, and a Spanish commission (Almagro, Spada, Martinez, and Isern),
who made the Napo transit in 1865. To Spix and Martius (1820), Bates and
Wallace (1848-1857), Azevedo and Pinto (1862-1864), and Agassiz (1865),
the world is indebted for the most scientific surveys of the river in
Brazil.

Such is the Amazon, the mightiest river in the world, rising amid the
loftiest volcanoes on the globe, and flowing through a forest
unparalleled in extent. "It only wants (wrote Father Acuna), in order to
surpass the Ganges, Euphrates, and the Nile in felicity, that its source
should be in Paradise." As if one name were not sufficient for its
grandeur, it has three appellations: Maranon, Solimoens, and Amazon; the
first applied to the part in Peru, the second to the portion between
Tabatinga and Manaos, and the third to all below the Rio Negro.[158] We
have no proper conception of the vast dimensions of the thousand-armed
river till we sail for weeks over its broad bosom, beholding it
sweeping disdainfully by the great Madeira as if its contribution was of
no account, discharging into the sea one hundred thousand cubic feet of
water per second more than our Mississippi, rolling its turbid waves
thousands of miles exactly as it pleases,--plowing a new channel every
year, with tributaries twenty miles wide, and an island in its mouth
twice the size of Massachusetts.

[Footnote 158: The upper part of the Maranon, from its source to Jaen,
is sometimes called the Tunguragua. Solimoens is no