Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest.

—On leaving the Island del Diamante (in the Orinoco), we entered on scenes of nature characterised by wildness and grandeur.

The air was filled with countless flocks of flamingoes and other water birds, which appeared against the blue sky like a dark cloud with continually varying outlines.

The river had here narrowed to between nine hundred and one thousand feet, and flowing in a perfectly straight line, formed a kind of canal enclosed on either side by dense wood.

The margin of the forest presents at this part a singular appearance.

In front of the almost inpenetrable wall of giant trunks there rises from the sandy river beach, with the greatest regularity, a low hedge of Sauso, only four feet high, consisting of a small shrub, Hermesia Castaneifolia, which forms a new genus of the family of Euphorbiaceæ.

Some slender thorny palms stand next; and the whole resembles a close, well-pruned garden hedge, having only occasional openings at considerable distances from each other, which have doubtless been made by the larger fourfooted beasts of the forest to gain easy access to the river.

One sees, more especially in the early morning and at sunset, the American tiger or jaguar, the tapir and the peccary, lead their young through these openings to the river to drink.

When startled by the passing canoe, they do not attempt to regain the forest by breaking forcibly through the hedge which has been described, but one has the pleasure of seeing these wild animals stalk leisurely along between the river and the hedge for four or five hundred paces, until they have reached the nearest opening, when they disappear through it.

In the course of an almost uninterrupted river navigation of 1,520 geographical miles on the Orinoco to near its sources on the Cassiquiare and on the Rio Negro —and during which we were confined for seventy days to a small canoe—we enjoyed the repetition of the same spectacle at several points, and, I may add, always with new delight.

There came down together to drink, to bathe, or to fish, groups consisting of the most different classes of animals, the large mammalia being associated with many coloured herons, palamedeas, and proudly stepping curassow and cashew birds.

“Es como en el Paraiso,” it is here as in Paradise, said with a pious air, our steersman, an old Indian who had been brought up in the house of an ecclesiastic.

The peace of the golden age was, however, far from prevailing among the animals of this American paradise, who carefully watched and avoided each other.—Humboldt.