The Northern Desert of Africa.

--Mountains and forests resound with the thunder of the falling waters, with the roar of the tiger-like jaguar, and with the melancholy rain, announcing howlings of the bearded apes.

In the midst of this grand and savage nature live many tribes of men, isolated from each other by the extraordinary diversity of their languages: some are nomadic, wholly unacquainted with agriculture, and using ants, gums, and earth as food.

These, as the Otomacs and Jarures, seem a kind of outcasts from humanity: others, like the Marquiritares and Macas, are settled, more intelligent and of milder manners, and live on fruits which they have themselves reared.

Large spaces between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo are only inhabited by the tapir and the social apes, and are wholly destitute of human beings.

Figures graven on the rocks show that even these deserts were once the seat of some degree of intellectual cultivation.

They bear witness to the changeful destinies of man, as de the unequally developed flexible languages; which latter belong to the oldest and most imperishable class of historic memorials.

But, as in the Steppe, tigers and crocodiles fight with horses and cattle, so in the forests on its borders, in the wildernesses of Guiana, man is ever armed against man.

Some tribes drink with unnatural thirst the blood of their enemies; others apparently weaponless and yet prepared for murder, kill with a poisoned thumb-nail.

The weaker hordes, when they have to pass along the sandy margin of the rivers, carefully efface with their hands the traces of their timid footsteps.

Thus man, in the lowest stage of almost animal rudeness, as well as amidst the apparent brilliancy of our higher cultivation, prepares for himself and his fellow men increased toil and danger.

The traveller wandering over the wide globe by sea and land, as well as the historic inquirer, searching the records of past ages, finds every where the uniform and saddening spectacle of man at variance with man.

He, therefore, who, amidst the unreconciled discord of nations, seeks for intellectual calm, gladly turns to contemplate the silent life of vegetation, and the hidden activities of forces and powers operating in the sanctuaries of nature, or, obedient to the inborn impulse which for thousands of years has glowed in the human breast, gases upwards in meditative contemplation on those celestial orbe, which are ever pursuing, in undisturbed harmony, their ancient and unchanging course.--Humboldt's "Cosmos."