the Chaco repeatedly and who had a file of notes and memo- randa which he kindly placed at my disposal. Only the fact that he asked me not to give his name prevents my giving him the credit that is his due. I have condensed the material he gave me to the following brief description, which serves to picture
Starting at Villa Concepcién on the Paraguay River, on the Tropic of Capricorn, and going west, one crosses the Pilco- mayo River and the Bermejo, just south of Embarcacién. | know of no published description of just this route, though we have the excellent general account of the missionary W. Bar- brooke Grubb,[1] who has described the section of the Chaco between the 23rd and 24th parallels. For thirty leagues (a league is the distance that a mule will travel in about an hour—it is about three miles and is not to be thought of as an exactly measured distance in country like this) west of Villa Concepcién the land is almost exclusively palma, that is low-lying compo, or grass covered country, liable to be inun- dated with water from the overflow of neighboring esteros, or swampy tracts, and dotted with palm groves. For the next fifteen leagues farther west the country is more broken, with algarrobo trees and small montfes, or forest—woodland we should call it—containing quebracho, and also with long esteros, some of them appearing to be abandoned river courses. Toward the end of the swampy stretches the palms gradually diminish and finally disappear, the quebracho becoming more plentiful. Here the land rises appreciably, the large esteros vanish, the soil is sandier, and grasses unlike the swamp grasses farther east begin to appear. Then for five leagues farther the montes become more numerous, with small quebracho tracts. The water becomes scarcer, lying in hollows which soon dry up. For the next six leagues the country is
- ↑ W. B. Grubb: An Unknown People in an Unknown Land, Philadelphia and London, 1911; and also idem: A Church in the Wilds, New York, ror4. In appendixes to the former Mr. Grubb quotes from Professor J. Graham Kerr's account of the Chaco and its exploration published in the Scottish Geogr. Mag., Vol. 8, 1892. “Chaco exploration is a sad record in many respects, showing an enormous expenditure of human life, with but very slight resulting gain to our knowledge.” To the list of attempted penetrations might be added that of Thouar in 1886-1887, which got more than half way across from the Pileomayo to the Paraguay in about latitude 22° 50′.
