VENEZUELA.
216
Around
.
and from
are miiny secondary j^Iateaux,
it
issue tiny
rills
which the
of water,
all
these
when he
traveller,
first
ohserves them shewing themselves from beneath the palmtrees, thinks will
being
soon be absorbed
m
the
however, they grow and grow
lost,
streams, and then, uniting, form rivers.
land
is full
of springs, and the
one thousand and sixty
map
Far from
soil.
they become
till
In
fact,
the whole
indicates the course of
which seven
rivers, all navigable, of
are of the 1st class, thirty of the 2nd, twenty-two of the 3rd,
and nine hundred and sixty-three of the 4th. sides its
many
lakes, of
which that of Maracaibo
There are beis
the largest,
circumference, including bays, being two hundi-ed and
fourteen Spanish leagues.
The
total area of
hundred and dred
and
miles, or
fifty-one
is thirty-five
Spanish square
twenty-nine
Though
thousand nine
leagTies, or four
and
thousand
more than that
taken together. of the
Venezuela
thirty-five
and Portugal
of France, Spain,
only one-seventh of the extent
United States, and one-seventh of that of Brazil,
larger than
N. Granada, Ecuador, Bolivia,
Chili, or
Codazzi divides Venezuela into three zones tural zone, pasture-land,
hun-
square
and
forest.
The
it is
Paraguay.
;
the agTicul-
fii'st
of these con-
tains eight thousand seven hundred and tliirty-seven square
leagues, of which five hundred only
There were
in
1840 only
six
had been cleared
in 1840.
hundred thousand and
fifty
inhabitants in this zone, which could support seven milhons.
Of pasture land
there are nine thousand square leagues, with
but thirty-nine thousand inhabitants.
There are eighteen
thousand two hundred and fourteen square leagues in the forest zone, of
which but nine were cleared in 1840, while
twelve thousan-d were covered with dense margin forest, and