measurement, are expressed in leagues (leguas) reckoned in the
colonies at three thousand, five thousand, and six thousand six
hundred and fifty varas.* (* Seamen being the first, and for a long
time the only, persons who introduced into the Spanish colonies any
precise ideas on the astronomical position and distances of places,
the legua nautica of 6650 varas, or of 2854 toises (20 in a degree),
was originally used in Mexico and throughout South America; but this
legua nautica has been gradually reduced to one-half or one-third, on
account of the slowness of travelling across steep mountains, or dry
and burning plains. The common people measure only time directly; and
then, by arbitrary hypotheses, infer from the time the space of ground
travelled over. In the course of my geographical researches, I have
had frequent opportunities of examining the real value of these
leagues, by comparing the itinerary distances between points lying
under the same meridian with the difference of latitudes.) Oviedo, who
must so often have passed over the valleys of Aragua, asserts that the
town of Nueva Valencia del Rey was built in 1555, at the distance of
half a league from the lake; and that the proportion between the
length of the lake and its breadth, is as seven to three. At present,
the town of Valencia is separated from the lake by level ground of
more than two thousand seven hundred toises (which Oviedo would no
doubt have estimated as a space of a league and a half); and the
length of the basin of the lake is to its breadth as 10 to 2.3, or as
7 to 1.6. The appearance of the soil between Valencia and Guigue, the
little hills rising abruptly in the plain east of the Cano de Cambury,
some of which (el Islote and la Isla de la Negra or Caratapona) have
even preserved the name of islands, sufficiently prove that the waters
have retired considerably since the time of Oviedo. With respect to
the change in the general form of the lake, it appears to me
improbable that in the seventeenth century its breadth was nearly the