Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We May
Consider As The Two Extremities Of The Andes, The Rock Or Granitic
Island Of Diego Ramirez, South Of
Cape Horn, and the mountains lying
at the mouth of Mackenzie River (latitude 69 degrees, longitude 130
1/2 degrees)
, More than twelve degrees west of the greenstone
mountains, known by the name of the Copper Mountains, visited by
Captain Franklin. The colossal peak of Saint Elias and that of Mount
Fairweather, in New Norfolk, do not, properly speaking, belong to the
northern prolongation of the Cordilleras of the Andes, but to a
parallel chain (the maritime Alps of the north-west coast), stretching
towards the peninsula of California, and connected by transversal
ridges with a mountainous land, between 45 and 53 degrees of latitude,
with the Andes of New Mexico (Rocky Mountains). In South America the
mean breadth of the Cordillera of the Andes is from 18 to 22 leagues.*
(* The breadth of this immense chain is a phenomenon well worthy of
attention. The Swiss Alps extend, in the Grisons and in the Tyrol, to
a breadth of 36 and 40 leagues, both in the meridians of the lake at
Como, the canton of Appenzell, and in the meridian of Bassano and
Tegernsee.) It is only in the knots of the mountains, that is where
the Cordillera is swelled by side-groups or divided into several
chains nearly parallel, and reuniting at intervals, for instance, on
the south of the lake of Titicaca, that it is more than 100 to 120
leagues broad, in a direction perpendicular to its axis.
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