Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799—1804.

By Alexander de Humboldt, and Aimé Bonpland, &c. &c. London, 1821, 8vo. 2 Vols. pp. 864.

These volumes, translated by H. Maria Williams, terminate the second volume (in quarto) of M. Humboldt’s personal narrative; and belong to a work so universally celebrated, that we need only say, they are, if possible, more thickly studded with pieces of valuable information and curious matter, than the parts which have preceded them.

We never take up Humboldt but he reminds us of Othello, who

—Spake of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents, by flood, and field; Of hair-breadth ’scapes— And ’portance in his travel’s history, Wherein of antres vast, and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven— And of the cannibals that each other eat; The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders,

he told the marvellous stories.

Our author is hardly a trace behind him; and, like the fair Desdemona, we, with greedy ear, devour up his discourse; whence, without further preface, we shall now proceed to draw for the benefit of our readers.

The natives near the cataracts or raudales of the Oroonoko, up which river M. de Humboldt made his way to a height little known to Europeans, are distinguished by several remarkable prejudices, among which, none are more fatal than those narrated in the following:— “Among the causes of the depopulation of the Raudales, I have not reckoned the small pox; that malady which, in other parts of America, makes such cruel ravages, that the natives, seized with dismay, burn their huts, kill their children, and renounce every kind of society.

This scourge is almost unknown on the banks of the Oronoko.

What depopulates the Christian settlements is, the repugnance of the Indians for the regulations of the missions, the insalubrity of a climate at once hot and damp, bad nourishment, want of care in the diseases of children, and the guilty practice of mothers of preventing pregnancy by the use of deleterious herbs.

Among the barbarous people of Guyana, as well as those of the half-civilized islands of the South Sea, young wives will not become mothers.

If they have children, their offspring are exposed, not only to the dangers of savage life, but also to the dangers arising from the strangest popular prejudices.

When twins are born, false notions of propriety and family honour require, that one of them should be destroyed.

‘To bring twins into the world, is to be exposed to public scorn; it is to resemble rats, opossums, and the vilest animals, which bring forth a great number of young at a time.’

Nay more: ‘two children born at the same time cannot belong to the same father.’ This is an axiom of physiology of the Salivas; and in every zone, and in different states of society, when the vulgar seize upon an axiom, they adhere to it with more stedfastness than the better informed men, by whom it was first hazarded.

To avoid a disturbance of conjugal tranquillity, the old female relations of the mother, or the mure japoic-nei (midwives,) take care, that one of the twins shall disappear.

If the new-born infant, though not a twin, have any physical deformity, the father instantly puts it to death.

They will have only robust and well-made children, for deformities indicate some influence of the evil spirit Ioloquiamo, or the bird Tikitiki, the enemy of the human race.

Sometimes children of a feeble constitution undergo the same fate.

When the father is asked, what is become of one of his sons, he will pretend, that he has lost him by a natural death.

He will disavow an action, that appears to him blameable, but not criminal.

’The poor mure,” he will tell you, ’could not follow us; we must have waited for him every moment; he has not been seen again, he did not come to sleep where we passed the night.’ Such is the candour and simplicity of manners, such the boasted happiness of man in the state of nature!

He kills his son, to escape the ridicule of having twins, or to avoid journeying more slowly; in fact, to avoid a little inconvenience.”

As the Mahas in the plaines of the Missoury, according to the accounts of the American travellers, Clark and Lewis.

In Tamanack mure signifies a child; emuru, a son.

Amid the prodigality and magnificence of nature, such are the moral evils which deform the scene; and we are often compelled to leave the author’s glowing descriptions of superb landscape in the torrid zone, to vex our spirits with similar details.

But, the able manner in which distant objects and remote similitudes are brought to bear on almost every subject discussed, is the great charm of this work; and we have so vast a quantity of intelligence combined with so rich a fund of amusing anecdote, that the mind never tires.

It has been alleged, that Mr. H. is too prone to this sort of classification, and to theories built upon it; but however that may be in a philosophical point of view, as a popular performance, it wonderfully enhances the attractions of his narrative.

He is, in truth, the very Jacques of travellers; and his way is delectable, “ compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of his travels, in which his often rumination wraps him in a most humourous sadness.”

He morals on every thing; for example:—

“The inhabitants of Atures and Maypures, whatever the missionaries may have asserted in their works, are not more struck with deafness by the noise of the great cataracts, than the catadupes of the Nile.

When this noise is heard in the plain that surrounds the mission, at the distance of more than a league, you seem to be near a coast skirted by reefs and breakers.

The noise is three times as loud by night as by day, and gives an inexpressible charm to these solitary scenes.

What can be the cause of this increased intensity of sound in a desert, where nothing seems to interrupt the silence of nature?

The velocity of the propagation of sound, far from augmenting, decreases with the lowering of the temperature.

The intensity diminishes in air, agitated by a wind, which is contrary to the direction of the sound; it diminishes also by dilatation of the air, and is weaker in the higher than in the lower regions of the atmosphere, where the number of particles of air in motion is greater in the same radius.

The intensity is the same in dry air, and in air mingled with vapours; but it is feebler in carbonic acid gas, than in mixtures of azot and oxygen.

From these facts, which are all we know with any certainty, it is difficult to explain a phenomenon observed near every cascade in Europe, and which, long before our arrival in the village of Atures, had struck the missionary and the Indians.

The nocturnal temperature of the atmosphere is 3° less than the temperature of the day; at the same time the apparent humidity augments at night, and the mist that covers the cataracts becomes thicker.

We have just seen, that the hygroscopic state of the air has no influence on the propagation of the sound, and that the cooling of the air diminishes its swiftness.

“It may be thought, that, even in places not inhabited by man, the hum of insects, the song of birds, the rustling of leaves agitated by the feeblest winds, occasion, during the day, a confused noise, which we perceive the less because it is uniform, and constantly strikes the ear.

Now this noise,

however slightly perceptible it may be, may diminish the intensity of a louder, noise; and this diminution may cease, if during the calm of the night the song of birds, the hum of insects, and the action of the wind upon the leaves, be interrupted.

But this reasoning, even admitting its justness, can scarcely be applied to the forests of the Oroonoko, where the air is constantly filled by an innumerable quantity of moschettoes, where the hum of insects is much louder by night than by day, and where the breeze, if ever it be felt, blows only after sunset.

“I rather think, that the presence of the sun acts upon the propagation and intensity of the sound by the obstacles which they find in the currents of air different density, and the partial undulations of the atmosphere caused by the unequal heating of different parts of the soil.

In calm air, whether it be dry, or mingled with vesicular vapours equally distributed, the sonorous undulation is propagated without difficulty.

But when the air is crossed in every direction by small currents of hotter air, the sonorous undulation is divided into two undulations; where the density of the medium changes abruptly, partial echoes are formed, that weaken the sound, because one of the streams comes back upon itself; and those divisions of undulations take place, of which Mr.

Poisson has recently developed the theory with great sagacity.

It is not therefore the movement of the particles of air from below to above in the ascending current, or the small oblique currents, that we consider as opposing by a shock the propagation of the sonorous undulations.

A shock, given to the surface of a liquid, will form circles around the center of percussion, even then the liquid is agitated.

Several kinds of undulations may cross each other in water, as in air, without being disturbed in their propagation; little movements may ride over each other, and the real cause of the less intensity of sound during the day appears to be the interruption of homogeneity in the elastic medium.

During the day, there is a sudden interruption of density, where ever small streamlets of air of a high temperature rise over parts of the soil unequally heated.

The sonorous undulations are divided, as the rays of light are refracted, and form the mirage (looming), wherever strata of air of unequal density are contiguous.

The propagation of sound is altered, when a stratum hydrogen gas is made to rise in a tube closed at one end above a stratum of atmospheric air; and Mr.

Biot has well explained, by the interposition of bubbles of carbonic acid gas, why a glass filled with Champagne wine is little sonorous so long as the gas is evolved, and continues to pass through the strata of the liquid.”

This hypothesis is well worth further investigations; but we must surrender it to the scientific journals, and continue our more mixed career.

“The Indians of Atures,” says Mr. H., “are mild, moderate, and accustomed, from the effects of their idleness, to the greatest privations.

Formerly, excited to labour by the Jesuits, they did not want for food.

The fathers cultivated maize, French beans, (frisoles), and other European vegetables; they even planted sweet oranges and tamarinds round the villages; and they possessed twenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses, in the savannahs of Atures and Carichana.

They had at their service a great number of slaves and servants (peones), to take care of their herds.

Nothing is now cultivated but a little cassava, and a few plantains.

The fertility of the soil however is such, that at Atures I counted on a single branch of musa 108 fruits, 4 or 5 of which would almost suffice for the daily nourishment of a man.

The culture of maize is entirely neglected, and the horses and cows have disappeared.

Near the raudal, a part of the village still bears the name of Passo del ganado (ford of the cattle), while the descendants of those very Indians, whom the Jesuits had assembled in a mission, speak of horned cattle as of animals of a race that is lost.

In going up the Oroonoko, toward San Carlos del Rio Negro, we saw the last cow at Carichana.

The fathers of the Observance, who now govern these vast countries, did not immediately succeed the Jesuits.

During an interregnum of eighteen years, the missions were visited only from time to time, and by Capuchin monks.

The agents of the secular government, under the title of Commissioners of the King, managed the hatos or farms of the Jesuits with culpable negligence.

They killed the cattle in order to sell the hides.

Many heifers were devoured by tigers, and a greater number perished in consequence of wounds made by the bats of the raudales, which are much less, but far bolder than the bats of the Llanos.

At the time of the expedition of the boundaries, the horses of Encaramada, Carichana, and Atures, were conveyed as far as San Jose of Maravitanos, where, on the banks of the Rio Negro, the Portugueze could only procure them after a long passage, and of a very inferior quality, by the river Amazon and Grand Para.

Since the year 1795, the cattle of the Jesuits have entirely disappeared.

There now remains in testimony of the ancient cultivation of these countries, and the industrious activity of the first missionaries, only a few trunks of the orange and tamarind in the savannahs, surrounded by wild trees.

“The tigers, or jaguars, which are less dangerous for the cattle than the bats, come into the village at Atures, and devour the pigs of the poor Indians.

The missionary related to us a striking instance of the familiarity of these animals, upon the whole so ferocious.

Some months before our arrival, a jaguar, which was thought to be young, though of a large size, had wounded a child in playing with him; I use confidently this expression, which may seem strange, having on the spot verified facts which are not without interest in the history of the manners of animals.

Two Indian children, a boy and a girl, about eight and nine years of age, were seated on the grass near the village of Atures, in the middle of a savannah, which we have often traversed. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a jaguar issued from the forest, and approached the children, bounding around them; sometimes he hid himself in the high grass, sometimes he sprang forward, his back bent, his head hung down, in the manner of our cats.

The little boy, ignorant of his danger, seemed to be sensible of it only when the jaguar with one of bis paws gave him some blows on the head.

These blows, at first slight, became ruder and ruder; the claws of the jaguar wounded the child, and the blood flowed with violence.

The little girl then took a branch of a tree, struck the animal, and it fled from her.

The Indians ran up at the cries of the children, and saw the jaguar, which retired bounding, without the least show of resistance.

“The little boy was brought to us, who appeared lively and intelligent.

The claw of the jaguar had taken away the skin from the lower part of the forehead, and there was a second scar at the top of the head.”

“Among the monkeys,” the author continues, “which we saw at the mission of the Atures, we found one new species of the tribe of sais and sajous, which the Creoles vulgarly call machis.

It is the ouavapavi with grey hair and a bluish face.

It has the orbits of the eyes and forehead as white as snow, which at first sight distinguish it from the simia capucina, the simia apella, the simia trepida, and the other weeping monkeys hitherto so confusedly described.

This little animal is as gentle as it is ugly.

Every day in the court-yard of the missionary it seized a pig, upon which it remained from morning till night, traversing the savannahs.

We have also seen it upon the back of a large cat, which bad been brought up with it in father Zea's house.

“It was among the cataracts that we began to hear of the hairy man of the woods, called salvaje, that carries off women, constructs huts, and sometimes eats human flesh.

The Tamanacks call it achi, and the Maypures vasitri, or great devil.

The natives and the missionaries have no doubt of the existence of this anthropomorphous monkey, which they singularly dread.

Father Gili gravely relates the history of a lady in the town of San Carlos, who much praised the gentle character and attentions of the man of the woods.

She lived several years with one in great domestic harmony, and only requested some hunters to take her back, ‘because she was tired, she and her children (a little hairy also), of living far from the church and the sacraments.”

The same author, notwithstanding his credulity, confesses, that he had not been able to find an Indian, who asserted positively that he had seen the salvaje with his own eyes.

This fable, which the missionaries, the European planters, and the negroes of Africa, have no doubt embellished with many features taken from the description of the manners of the ourang outang, the gibbon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the pongo, pursued us during five years from the north

ern to the southern hemisphere; and we were every where blamed, in the most cultivated class of society, for being the only persons to doubt the existence of the great anthropomorphous monkey of America.

We shall first observe, that there are certain regions, where this belief is particularly prevalent among the people; such are the banks of the Upper Oroonoko, the valley of Upar near the Lake of Maracaybo, the mountains of Santa Martha and of Merida, the provinces of Quixos, and the banks of the Amazon near Tomependa.

In all these places, so distant one from the other, it is repeated, that the salvaje is easily recognized by the traces of its feet, the toes of which are turned backward.

But if there exist a monkey of a large size in the New Continent, how has it happened, that during three centuries no man worthy of belief has been able to procure the skin of one?

Several hypotheses present themselves to the mind, in order to explain the source of so ancient an error or belief.

Has the famous capuchin monkey of Esmeralda, the canine teeth of which are more than six lines and a half long, the physiognomy much more like man’s than that of the ourang outang, and which, when irritated, rubs its beard with its hand, give rise to the fable of the salvaje?

It is not so large indeed as the coaita (simia paniscus); but when seen at the top of a tree, and the head only visible, it might easily be taken for a human being.

It may be also (and this opinion appears to me the most probable), that the man of the woods was one of those large bears, the footsteps of which resemble those of a man, and which is believed in every country to attack women.

The animal killed in my time at the foot of the mountains of Merida, and sent, by the name of salvaje, to Colonel Ungaro, the governor of the province Varinas, was in fact a bear with black and smooth fur.”

These extraordinary accounts are succeeded by a detailed history of the Moschettoes of this region; perhaps the most remarkable of all its animal phenomena.

“Persons who have not navigated the great rivers of equinoctial America, for instance, the Oroonoko and the Rio Magdalena, can scarcely conceive, how without interruption, at every instant of life, you may be tormented by insects flying in the air, and how the multitude of these little animals may render vast regions wholly uninhabitable.

However accustomed you may be to endure pain without complaint, however lively an interest you may take in the objects of your researches, it is impossible not to be constantly disturbed by the moschettoes, zancudoes, jejens and tempraneroes, that cover the face and hands, pierce the clothes with their long sucker in the form of a needle, and, getting into the mouth and nostrils, set you coughing and sneezing whenever you attempt to speak in the open air.

In the missions of the Oroonoko, in the villages placed on the banks of the river, surrounded by immense forests, the plaga de las moscas, the plague of the flies, affords an inexhaustible subject of conversation.

When two persons meet in the morning, the first questions they address to each other are, ‘How did you find the zancudoes during the night?

How are we to day for the moschettoes.’ These questions remind us of a Chinese form of politeness, which indicates the ancient state of the country where it took birth.

Salutations were made heretofore in the celestial empire, in the following words, vou-touhou, ‘Have you been incommoded in the night by the serpents?’ We shall soon see, that on the banks of the Tuamini, in the river Magdalena, and still more at Choco, the country of gold and platina, the Chinese compliment on the serpents might be added to that of the moschettoes.”

Other curious facts are recorded, and illustrate this subject.

Mr. H. says—

“At Mandavaca we found an old missionary, who told us with an air of sadness, that he bad spent his twenty years of moschettoes in America. He desired us to look well at his legs, that we might be able to tell one day, ‘poor alla (beyond sea), what the poor monks suffer in the forests of Cassiquiare.’ Every sting leaving a small darkish brown point, his legs were so speckled, that it was difficult to recognize the whiteness of his skin through the spots of coagulated blood.

If the insects of the simulium genus abound in the Cassiquiare, which has white waters, the culices, or zancudoes, are so much the more rare; you scarcely find any there, while on the rivers of black waters, in the Atabapo and the Rio Negro, there are generally some zancudoes and no moschettoes.” (To be continued).

HUMBOLDT’S TRAVELS, (Continued.)

Our last number left us in the midst of a swarm of moschettoes, and, however painful it has been to remain a week among these pestiferous insects, there we are still.

Proceeding with his anecdotes to illustrate their natural history, our author says:

“I have just shown, from my own observations, how much the geographical distribution of venomous insects varies in this labyrinth of rivers with white and black waters.

It were to be wished, that a learned entomologist could study on the spot the specific differences of these noxious insects, which in the torrid zone, in spite of their littleness, act an important part in the economy of nature.

What appeared to us very remarkable, and is a fact, known to all the missionaries, is, that the different species do not associate together, and that at different hours of the day you are stung by a distinct species.

Every time that the scene changes, and to use the simple expression of the missionaries, other insects ‘mount guard,’ you have a few minutes, often a quarter of an hour, of repose.

The insects that disappear have not their places instantly supplied in equal numbers by their successors.

From half after six in the morning till five in the afternoon, the air is

filled with moschettoes; which have not, as we find related in some travels, the form of our gnats, but that of a small fly.

They are simuliums of the family nemoceræ of the system of Latreille.

Their sting is as painful as that of stomoxes.

It leaves a little reddish-brown spot, which is extravasated and coagulated blood, where their proboscis has pierced the skin.

An hour before sun-set a species of small gnats, called tempraneros, because they appear also at sun-rise, take the place of the moschettoes.

Their presence scarcely lasts an hour and a half; they disappear between six and seven in the evening, or, as they say here, after the Angelus(a la oracion).

After a few minutes repose, you feel yourself stund by zancudoes, another species of gnat (culex) with very long legs.

The zancudo, the proboscis of which contains a sharp pointed sucker, causes the most acute pain, and a swelling that remains several weeks.

Its hum resembles that of our gnats in Europe, but is louder and more prolonged.

The Indians pretend to distinguish ‘by their song’ the zancudoes and the tempraneroes; the latter of which are real twilight insects, while the zancudoes are most frequently nocturnal insects, and disappear towards sun-rise.

“The culices of South America, have generally the wings, corselet, and legs of an azure colour, annulated, and variable from a mixture of spots of a metallic lustre.

Here, as in Europe, the males, which are distinguished by their feathered antennæ, are extremely rare; you are seldom stung except by females.

The preponderance of this sex explains the immense increase of the species, each female laying several hundred eggs.

In going up one of the great rivers of Ameriva, it is observed, that the appearance of a new species of culex denotes the approximity of a new stream flowing in.’

“The whites born in the torrid zone walk barefoot with impunity in the same apartment where a European recently landed is exposed to the attack of the niguas or chegoes (pulex penetrans).

These animals, almost invisible to the eye, get under the nails of the feet, and there acquire the size of a small pea by the quick increase of its eggs, which are placed in a bag under the belly of the insect.

The nigua, therefore, distinguishes, what the most delicate chemical analysis could not distinguish, the cellular membrane and blood of a European from those of a Creole white.

It is not so with the moschettoes.

“In the day, even when labouring at the oar, the natives, in order to chase the insects, are continually giving one another smart slaps with the palm of the hand.

Rude in all their movements, they strike themselves and their comrades mechanically during their sleep.

The violence of their blows reminds us of the Persian tale of the bear, that tried to kill with his paw the insects on the forehead of his sleeping master.

Near Maypures we saw some young Indians seated in a circle and rubbing cruelly each others backs with the bark of trees dried at the fire.

Indian women were occupied with a degree of patience, of which the copper-coloured race alone are capable, in extirpating by means of a sharp bone the little mass of coagulated blood, that forms the centre of every sting, and gives the skin a speckled appearance.

One of the most barbarous nations of the Oroonoko, that of the Otomacs, is acquainted with the use of moschetto curtains (mosquiteros) formed of a tissue of fibres of the palm tree, murichi.

We had lately seen, that at Higuerote, on the coast of Caraccas, the people of a copper colour sleep buried in the sand.

In the villages of the Rio Magdalena the Indians often invited us to stretch ourselves with them on ox-skins, near the church, in the middle of the plaza grande, where they had assembled all the cows in the neighbourhood.

The proximity of cattle give some repose to man.

The Indians of the Upper Oroonoko and the Cassiquiare, seeing that Mr.

Bonpland could not prepare his herbal, on account of the continual torment of the moschettoes, invited him to enter their oveus, (hornitos).

Thus they call little chambers, without doors or windows, into which they creep horizontally through a very small opening.

When they have driven away the insects by means of a fire of wet brush-wood, which emits a great deal of smoke, they close the opening of the oven.

The absence of moschettoes is purchased clearly enough by the excessive heat of stagnant air, and the smoke of a torch of copal, which lights the oven during your stay in it. Mr. Bonpland, with courage and patience well worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, shut up in these hornitos of the Indians.

“It is difficult not to smile at hearing the missionaries dispute on the size and voracity of the moschettoes at different parts of the same river.

In the centre of a country ignorant of what is passing in the rest of the world, this is the favorite subject of conversation.

‘How I pity your situation!’ said the missionary of the raudales to the missionary of Cassiquiare, at our departure:

‘you are alone, like me, in this country of tigers and monkeys; with you fish is still more rare, and the heat more violent; but as for my flies, (mia moscas)

I can boast, that with one of mine I would beat three of yours.’

“This voracity of insects in certain spots, the rage with which they attack man, the activity of the venom varying in the same species, are very remarkable facts; which find their analogy, however, in the classes of large animals.

The crocodile of Angostura pursues men, while at Nueva Barcelona, in the Rio Neveri, you may bathe tranquilly in the midst of the carnivorous reptiles.

The jaguars of Maturin, Cumanacoa, and the isthmus of Panama, are cowardly in comparison to those of the Upper Oroonoko.

The Indians well know, that the monkey of some valleys can easily be tamed, while others of the same species, caught elsewhere, will rather die of hunger, than submit to slavery.”

“I might have added the example of the scorpion of Cumana, which it is very difficult to distinguish from that of the island of Trinidad, Jamaica, Carthagena, and Guayaquil; yet the former is not more to be feared than the scorpio europæus (of the south of France), while the latter produces consequences far more alarming than the scorpio occitanus (of Spain and Barbary).

At Carthagena and Guayaquil, the sting of the scorpion (alacran) instantly causes the loss of speech.

Sometimes a singular torpor of the tongue is observed for fifteen or sixteen hours.

The patient, when stung in the legs, stammers as if he had been struck with apoplexy.”

By this time we fancy our readers are as well acquainted with the habits of the moschettoes, as if they had been bitten by them all over; and further knowledge being unnecessary, we shall advance to other subjects.

Above the cataract of Atures, at the mouth of the Rio Calaniapo, Mr. Humboldt gives the following account of an extinct tribe:

“We were shown at a distance, on the right of the river, the rocks that surround the cavern of Ataruipe; but we had not time to visit the cemetry of the destroyed tribe of the Atures.

We regretted this so much the more, as father Zea was never weary of talking to us of the skeletons painted with anotta, which this cavern contained; of the large vases of baked earth, in which the bones of separate families appeared to be collected; and of many other curious objects, which we proposed to examine at our return from the Rio Negro.”

At Maypure, higher up, we hear more of the pottery of the Indians:

“In every part of the forests, far from any human habitation, on digging the earth, fragments of pottery and delft are found.

The taste for this kind of fabrication seems to have been common heretofore to the natives of both Americas.

To the north of Mexico,—on the banks of the Rio Gala— among the ruins of an Azteck city—in the United States—near the tumuli of the Miamis; in Florida—and in every place where any trace of ancient civilization could be found, the soil covers fragments of painted pottery; and the extreme resemblances of the ornaments they display is striking.

Savage nations, and those civilized people, who are condemned by their political and religious institutions always to imitate themselves, strive, as if by instinct, to perpetuate the same forms, to preserve a peculiar type or style, and to follow the methods and processes which were employed by their ancestors.

In North America, fragments of delft have been discovered in places where lines of fortification are found, and the walls of towns constructed by an unknown nation, now entirely extinct.

The paintings on these fragments have a great similitude to those which are executed in our days on earthenware by the natives of Louisiana and Florida.

Thus too the Indians of Maypure often painted before our eyes the same ornaments as we had observed in the cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human bones.

They are real grecques, meandrites, and figures of crocodiles, of monkeys, and of a large qua-

druped, which I could not recognize, though it has always the same squat form.”

Above Maypure this is indeed a “New World,”:

Mr. Humboldt says:—

“When the traveller has passed the great cataracts, he feels as if he were in a new world; and had overstepped the barriers which nature seems to have raised between the civilized countries of the coast and the savage and unknown interior.

Toward the east, in the bluish distance, appeared for the last time, the high chain of the Cunavami mountains.

Its long horizontal ridge reminded us of the Mesa of Bergantin, near Cumana; but it terminates by a truncated summit.

The peak of Calitamini (the name given to this summit) glows at sun-set as with reddish fire.

This appearance is every day the same.

No one ever approached the summit of this mountain, the height of which does not exceed six hundred toises.

I believe this splendor, commonly reddish and sometimes silvery, to be a reflexion produced by large plates of talc, or by gneiss passing into mica-slate.

The whole of this country contains granitic rocks, on which here and there, in little plains, an argillaceous grit-stone immediately reposes, containing fragments of quartz, and of brown iron ore.

“In going to the embarcadere” he continues, “we caught on the trunk of a hevea, a new species of tree frog, remarkable for its beautiful colours; it had a yellow belly, the back and head of a fine velvetty purple, and a very narrow stripe of white from the point of the nose to the hinder extremities.

This frog was two inches long, and allied to the rana tinctoria, the blood of which, it is asserted, introduced into the skin of a parrot, in places where the feathers have been plucked out, occasions the growth of frizzled feathers of a yellow or red colour.

But this is not only the region of real wonders; it has its fictions also.

“The forests of Sipapo are altogether unknown, and there the missionaries place the nation of Rayas, who have their mouth in the navel.

An old Indian, whom we met at Carichano, and who boasted of having often eaten human flesh, had seen these acephali ‘with his own eyes.’ These absurd fables are spread as far as the Llanos, where you are not always permitted to doubt the existence of the Raya Indians.

In every zone intolerance accompanies credulity; and it might be said, that the fictions of ancient geographers had passed from one hemisphere to the other, did we not know, that the most fantastic productions of the imagination, like the works of nature, furnish every where a certain analogy of aspect and form.”