The Andes and the Himalaya, the most stupendous mountain-chains of the world, raise their snow-clad summits either within the tropics or immediately beyond their verge, and must be considered as ordained by Providence to counteract the effects of the vertical sunbeams over a vast extent of land. In Western Tropical America, in Asia, and in Africa, there are immense countries rising like terraces thousands of feet above the level of the ocean, and reminding the European traveler of his distant northern home by their productions and their cool temperature. Thus, by means of a few simple physical and geological causes acting and reacting upon each other on a magnificent scale, Nature has bestowed a wonderful variety of climate upon the tropical regions, producing a no less wonderful diversity of plants and of animals.

Embracing the broad base of South America, the tropical regions bring before us the wide-spreading llanos of Venezue'la and New Grana'da; the majestic Andes, rising through every zone of vegetation to an Arctic region of perpetual snow; and the high table-lands of Peru and Bolivia, where the llama, the alpaca, and the vicuna have their home. The frosts of winter and an eternal spring are nowhere found in closer proximity than in the Peruvian highlands: for deep valleys cleave the windy Puna, as these lofty table-lands are called; and when the traveller, benumbed by the cold blasts of the mountain-plains, descends into the sheltered gorges, he almost suddenly finds himself transported from a northern climate to a terrestrial paradise.