and therefore they could not have flung the bottle into it."

"Unless they flung it into rivers which ran into the sea,"
returned Paganel.

This reply was so unexpected, and yet so admissible, that it
made them all completely silent for a minute, though their
beaming eyes betrayed the rekindling of hope in their hearts.
Lady Helena was the first to speak.

"What an idea!" she exclaimed.

"And what a good idea," was Paganel's naive rejoinder to her exclamation.

"What would you advise, then?" said Glenarvan.

"My advice is to follow the 37th parallel from the point where it
touches the American continent to where it dips into the Atlantic,
without deviating from it half a degree, and possibly in some part
of its course we shall fall in with the shipwrecked party."

"There is a poor chance of that," said the Major.

"Poor as it is," returned Paganel, "we ought not to lose it.
If I am right in my conjecture, that the bottle has been carried
into the sea on the bosom of some river, we cannot fail to find
the track of the prisoners. You can easily convince yourselves
of this by looking at this map of the country."

He unrolled a map of Chili and the Argentine provinces as he spoke,