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soil and its productions-the jungle and its den-long too much prevailed in what are called the izens-the ocean and its life, are all of modern higher circles of society."

origin. Man himself, as the representative of his In the first volume of his work, Baron Humrace, is but an upstart in the chronicle of time.boldt treats of the steppes and deserts of the earth The primeval antiquities of our planet, and the of the cataracts of the Orinoco, and of the records of its ancient life, lie buried in the crypts nocturnal life of animals in the primeval forests; beneath us. Its history is engraven on walls of and in the second, he discusses the physiognomy stone, in characters which long baffled his inge- of plants, describes the structure and mode of nuity; but the geologist and the naturalist have at action of volcanoes in different parts of the globe, last deciphered them. He whose power is infi- treats of the vital force, and concludes with a nite could have called the earth into being in the description of the plateaux of Caxamarca, the very instant which preceded the creation of man ; ancient capital of the Inca Atahualpa, and the but that power has been exercised through other first view of the Pacific Ocean from the crest of agencies, and in conformity with material laws; the Andes. These different treatises, as we may and long cycles of years have thus been required call them, are concise and popular, for the perusal to prepare the earth for the reception of beings of the general reader, and are followed by copious intellectual and immortal. To read that history, annotations and additions, for the use of those who to study these antiquities, and to contemplate with wish to investigate more profoundly and extenwonder and awe the subterranean aspects of nature, sively the subjects to which they relate. is a privilege which none who understands it will renounce, and a duty which none who enter upon it will decline.

The aspects of nature around us, and above us, and beneath us, while they are a never-ending Bource of instruction and enjoyment, cannot fail to prepare the mind for nobler studies, and for higher destinies.

The widely extended, and apparently interminable plains, which have received the name of steppes, deserts, Llanos, pampas, prairies, and barrens, present themselves to the traveller under all the zones into which our globe has been divided; but in each they have a peculiar physiognomy, depending on diversity of soil, of climate, and of elevation above the sea. The heaths in

land to the mouth of the Scheldt, are regarded by our author as true steppes, though their extent is small, when compared with the Llanos or pampas of South America, or the prairies of the Missouri, or the barrens of the Coppermine river, on which the shaggy buffalo and the musk ox range in countless herds.†

There is, doubtless, no living philosopher who the north of Europe, with their purple blossoms, could conduct us, with the same safety and inter-rich in honey, extending from the point of Jutest as Baron Humboldt, over these wonderful fields of the material world. With his own eye he has seen the grand phenomena which he records. He has trodden the deserts and the Llanos of the far west; he has climbed its volcanic cones, and breathed the vapors which they exhale; he has swept over its cataracts, and threaded its forests; and with the profound knowledge of a naturalist and a philosopher, he has described what he saw with all the precision of truth, and with all the eloquence of poetry.

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The desert plains in the interior of Africa are parts of a sea of sand, separating fertile regions, or enclosing them like islands. On these desolate plains neither dew nor rain descends; and except in the oases, to which malefacotrs were sent in the later times of the Cæsars, vegetable life is wholly extinct. Herds of antelopes, and swift-footed ostriches, roam through these vast regions; and though the verdant shores of the watered oases are frequented by nomadic tribes, the African desert must be regarded as uninhabitable by man. Bordering nations cross it periodically, by routes which have been unchanged for thousands of years, and by the aid of the camel, the ship of the desert, the adventurous merchant is enabled to cross it from Tafilet to Timbuctoo, and from Moorzouk to Bornou. The extent of these vast plains, lying partly within, and partly in the vicinity, of the tropics, is three times as great as that of the Mediterranean Sea.

In the work which we have placed at the head of this article, its author "has sought to indicate the unfailing influence of external nature on the feelings, the moral dispositions, and the destinies of man," and viewing the "soothing influence of the contemplation of nature, as peculiarly precious to those who are oppressed with the cares or the sorrows of life," he dedicates his work more especially to them, and invites them, while escaping from the stormy waves of life," "to follow him in spirit to the recesses of the primeval forests, over the boundless surface of the steppe, and to the higher ridges of the Andes." Enjoying, "in his eightieth year, the satisfaction of completing a third edition of his work, and remoulding it entirely afresh, to meet the requirements of the present time," he "hopes that these volumes may tend to inspire and cherish a love for the study of nature, by bringing together, in a small space, the results of careful observation, on the most varied subjects, by showing the importance of exact numerical data, and the use to be made of them by well considered arrangement and comparison, and by opposing the dogmatic half-in a few days, by driving the wild herds into artificial knowledge and arrogant scepticism, which have

The most extensive, if not the loftiest steppes, on the surface of the globe, occur in the temperate zone, on the plateau of central Asia, which lies between the gold mountains of the Altai and the

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*This observation is entirely inapplicable to the 'higher circles of society" in England.

+ The Indians sometimes kill from 600 to 700 buffaloes

enclosures.

Kuenlun. They extend from the Chinese wall to ward, on quitting the mountain valleys of Caracbeyond the celestial mountains, and towards the cas. It occupies a space of 256,000 English sea of Aral, through a length of many thousand square miles, stretching from the coast chain of miles. About thirty years after his journey to the Caraccas to the forests of Guiana, and from the South America, our author visited an extent snowy mountains of Merida to the great Delta at of 2800 miles of these Asiatic steppes. Some-the mouth of the Orinoco. To the south-west, a times hilly, and sometimes interrupted by dis-branch is prolonged to the unvisited sources of persed groups of pine forests, they exhibit a far the Guaviare, and the lonely mountains to which more varied vegetation than those of the new the excited fancy of the Spanish soldiery gave the world. The finest parts of these plains, inhabited name of Paramo de la Suma Paz-the seat of by pastoral tribes, are adorned with flowering perfect peace. The Pampas of Buenos Ayres are herbaceous plants of great height; and while the of such extent that while their northern margin traveller is driving in his Tartar carriage over is bordered by palm trees, their southern extremtheir pathless surface, the thickly crowded plants ity is almost continually covered with ice. In bend before the wheels, and such is their height, these grassy plains, troops of dogs, descended that he is obliged to rise up and look around him, from those introduced by the colonists, have to see the direction in which to move. "Some become completely wild. They live socially, of the Asiatic steppes are grassy plains; others inhabiting subterranean hollows, in which they are covered with succulent evergreen articulated hide their young, and often attacking man with a soda plants; and many glisten from a distance bloodthirsty rage. When the society becomes too with flakes of exuded salt, which cover the clayey numerous, some families migrate and form new soil, not unlike in appearance to fresh fallen colonies. snow."

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The absence of human inhabitants from the Dividing the very ancient civilization of Thibet South American steppes has given free scope for and Hindostan from the rude nations of Northern the development of the most varied forms of aniAsia, these Mongolian and Tartarian steppes have mal life; "a development limited only by their in various ways exercised an important influence mutual pressure, and similar to that of vegetable on the changeful destinies of man. Compress-life in the forests of the Orinoco, where the ing the population towards the South, they have Hymenæa and the gigantic laurel are never tended, more than the Himalaya, or the snowy mountains of Sirinagur and Ghorka, to impede the intercourse of nations, and to place permanent limits to the extension of milder manners, and of artistic and intellectual cultivation in Northern Asia."

exposed to the destructive hand of man, but only to the pressure of the luxuriant climbers which twine around their massive trunks. Agoutis, small spotted antelopes, cuirassed armadilloes, which, like rats, startle the hare in its subterranean holes, herds of lazy chiguires, beautifully striped viverra, which poison the air with their odor, the large maneless lion, spotted jaguars, (often called tigers,) strong enough to drag away a young bull after killing him-these and many other forms of animal life wander through the treeless plains."

But in the history of the past, (says our author,) it is not alone as an opposing barrier that we must regard the plains of central Asia. More than once they have proved the source from which devastation has spread over distant lands. The pastoral nations of these steppes Moguls, Getæ, Alani, and Usuni-have shaken the world. As in the course of past ages, early intellectual Thus, almost exclusively inhabited by these wild culture has come, like the cheering light of the animals, the steppe would offer little attraction or sun, from the east, so at a later period, from the means of subsistence to those nomadic native hordes, same direction, barbaric rudeness has threatened to who, like the Asiatics of Hindostan, prefer vegetaoverspread and involve Europe in darkness. A ble nutriment, if it were not for the occasional presbrown pastoral race, of Tukiuish or Turkish ence of single individuals of the fan palm, the maudescent the Hiongnu, dwelling in tents of skins, ritia. The benefits of this life-supporung tree are inhabited the elevated steppes of Gobi. Long ter- widely celebrated; it alone, from the mouth of the rible to the Chinese power, a part of this tribe was Orinoco to north of the Sierra de Imatara, feeds driven back into central Asia. The shock or the unsubdued natives of the Guaranis. When this impulse thus given passed from nation to nation, people were more numerous, and lived in closer until it reached the ancient land of the Finns, near contiguity, not only did they support their huts on the Ural mountains. From thence Huns, Avari, the cut trunks of palm trees as pillars, on which Ghazares, and various admixtures of Asiatic races, rested a scaffolding forming the floor, but they also, broke forth. Armies of Huns appeared success-it is said, twined from the leaf-stalks of the mauively on the Volga, in Pannonia, on the Marne, ritia cords and mats, which, skilfully interwoven and on the Po, desolating those fair and fertile and suspended from stem to stem, enabled them in fields, which, since the time of Antenor, civilized the rainy season, when the Delta is overflowed, to man had adorned with successive monuments. Thus went forth from Mongolian deserts a deadly blast, which withered, on Cisalpine ground, the tender, long cherished flower of art!-Vol. i.,

p. 6.

The great steppe of South America displays itself to the traveller's eye when he looks south

live in the trees like the apes. The floor of these raised cottages is partly covered with a coating of damp clay, on which the women make fires for household purposes, the flames appearing at night from the river to be suspended high in air. The Guaranis still owe the preservation of their physical, and perhaps also their moral independence, to the half-submerged marshy soil, over which they

move with a light and rapid step, and to their ele- | proach his lips to the plant, and drink the cool vated dwellings in the trees-a habitation never juice. But resort to this vegetable fountain is not likely to be chosen from motives of religious enthu- always without danger, and one sees many animals siasm by an American Stylites. But the mauritia that have been lamed by the prickles of the cactus. affords to the Guaranis not merely a secure dwell- When the heat of the burning day is followed by ing-place, but also various kinds of food. Before the coolness of the night, even then the horses and the flower of the rich palm tree breaks through its cattle cannot enjoy repose. Enormous bats suck tender sheath, and only at that period of vegetable their blood like vampires during their sleep, or metamorphosis, the pith of the stem of the tree attach themselves to their backs, causing festering contains a meal resembling sago, which, like the wounds, in which mosquitoes, hippobosces, and a farina of the jatropha root, is dried in thin, bread- host of stinging insects niche themselves.-Vol. i., like slices. The fermented juice of the tree forms pp. 17, 18. the sweet intoxicating palm wine of the Guaranis. The scaly fruits, which resemble in their appear- Llano is entirely changed. Sweet odors are exWhen the rainy season arrives, the aspect of the ance reddish fir cones, afford, like the plantain and almost all tropical fruits, a different kind of nutri- haled from its previously barren surface. Grasses. ment according as they are eaten, after their sac- in great variety spring up around; the mimosas charine substance is fully developed, or in their unfold their drooping leaves, and the water plants earlier or more farinaceous state. Thus, in the open their blossoms to the sun. Mud volcanoes lowest stage of man's intellectual development, we burst out from the moistened clay, and a gigantic find the existence of an entire people bound up with water-snake or crocodile often issues from the spot. that of a single tree, like the insect which lives In describing the phenomena of the rainy season, exclusively on a single part of a particular flower. -Vol. i., pp. 15-17. our author has introduced some very brief notices of the attacks made upon brood mares and their foals in the swollen streams, and of the battles which take place between the electrical eels and the wild horses; but as we have already given a full account of these and other interesting phenomena in a review of his Kosmos, we must refer our readers to that article. Cruel though they be, we read with pleasure the details of battles, when Nature has supplied the combatants with the instinct to use them; but we turn with pain from weapons of destruction, and with the ferocious those scenes of blood, in which man is the hero and

Since the discovery of America the Llanos have become habitable, and towns have been built here and there on the banks of the streams which water them. Huts formed of reeds bound by thongs, and covered with skins, have been placed at the distance of a day's journey from each other; and innumerable herds of oxen, horses, and mules, estimated at a million and a half thirty-five years ago, roam over the plains, exposed to numberless danUnder a vertical and never clouded sun, the gers. carbonized turf cracks and pulverizes, and when the dust and sand are raised by opposing winds in the electrically charged centre of the revolving current, they have the form of inverted cones like the waterspouts of the ocean.

the victim.

As in the steppes 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 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 margins 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 dan ger. The traveller wandering over the wide globe by sea and land, as well as the historic inquirer searching the records of past ages, finds everywhere the uniform and saddening spectacle of man at variance with man. He, therefore, who amid the unreconciled discord of nations secks for intellec tual calm, gladly turns to contemplate the silent life of vegetation, and the hidden activity 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, gazes upwards in meditative contemplation on these celestial orbs which are ever pursuing, in undisturbed harmony, their ancient and unchanging course.Pp. 25, 26.

The lowering sky sheds a dim, almost straw-man. colored light on the desolate plain. The horizon draws suddenly nearer; the steppe seems to contract, and with it the heart of the wanderer. The hot, dusty particles which fill the air, increase its suffocating heat; and the east wind, blowing over the long heated soil, brings with it no refreshment, but rather a still more burning glow. The pools, which the yellow fading branches of the fan palm had protected from evaporation, now gradually disappear. As in the icy north the animals become torpid with cold, so here, under the influence of the parching droughts, the crocodile and the boa become motionless, and fall asleep deeply buried in the dry mud. Everywhere the death-threatening drought prevails, and yet by the play of the refracted rays of light producing the phenomenon of the mirage, the thirsty traveller is everywhere pursued by the illusive image of a cool, rippling, watery mirror. Half-concealed by the dark clouds of dust, restless with the pain of thirst and hunger, the horses and cattle roam around, the cattle lowing dismally, and the horses stretching out their long necks and snuffing the wind, if haply a moister current may betray the neighborhood of a not wholly dried up pool. More sagacious and cunning, the mule seeks a different mode of allevi- Baron Humboldt proposes to describe" in particular In his section on the Cataracts of Orinoco, ating his thirst. The ribbed and spherical meloncactus conceals under its prickly envelope a watery two scenes of nature in the wilderness of Guiana pith. The mule first strikes the prickles aside the celebrated cataracts of the Orinoco, the with his forefeet, and then ventures warily to ap- Atures and Maypures," which few Europeans

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had seen previous to his visit.

At the mouth of the Orinoco, where its milk-white waters bedim the bright blue of the Atlantic, its width is less than that of the river Plate or the Amazons. Its length is only 1120 geographical miles; but at the distance of 560 miles from its mouth, its breadth, when full, is 17,265 English feet, or nearly 3 miles; and the height to which it here rises above its lowest level is from 30 to 36 feet. After pursuing a westerly and then a northerly course, it runs again to the east, so that its mouth is nearly in the same meridian as its source! Near the mouths of the Sodomoni and the Guapo stands the grand and picturesque mountain of Duida, and among the cocoa groves to the east of it are found trees of the Bertholletia excelsa, the most vigorous and gigantic of the productions of the tropical world. From this region the Indians obtain the materials for the long blow-pipes out of which they discharge their arrows. The plant, from which they obtain tubes about eighteen feet long, from knot to knot, is a grass, a species of the arundinaria, which grows to the height of thirty or forty feet, though its thickness is scarcely half an inch in diameter.

mouth of the Guaviare and Atabapo grows the noblest of the palms, "the Piriguao," whose smooth and polished trunk, about sixty-five feet high, is adorned with the most delicate flag-like foliage, and bears large and beautiful fruit like peaches, which, when prepared in a variety of ways, affords a nutricious and farinaceous food to the natives.

At the junction of the Meta, there rises from the middle of a mighty whirlpool an isolated cliff, called the Rock of Patience, as voyagers sometimes require two days to pass it; and opposite the Indian mission of Carichano, the eye of the traveller is riveted on an abrupt rock, ElMogote de Cocuyza, a cube with vertically precipitous sides, above 200 feet high, and carrying on its surface forests of trees of rich and varied foliage. Like a Cyclopean monument in its simple grandeur, this central mass rises high above the tops of the surrounding palms, marking the deep azure of the sky, with its sharp and rugged outlines, and uplifting "its summit high in air, a forest above the forest." In the lower parts of the river near the sea, great natural rafts, consisting of trees torn from the banks by the swelling of the river, are encountered by the boatmen, whose canoes are often wrecked by striking against them in the dark. These rafts, which are covered like meadows with flowering water plants, remind the traveller of the floating gardens of the Mexican lakes.

As the Orinoco imparts a black color to the reddish white granite which it has washed for a thousand years, the existence of similar black hollows, at heights of nearly 200 feet above the present bed of the river, indicates the fact," that the streams whose magnitude now excites our astonishment, are only the feeble remains of the immense masses of water that belonged to an earlier age of the world." The very natives of Guiana called the attention of our author to the traces of the former height of the waters. On a grassy plain, near Uruana, stands an isolated granite rock, upon which are engraven, at a height of more than eighty feet, figures of the sun and moon, and of many animals, particularly crocodiles and boas, arranged almost in rows or lines. The natives believe that these figures were carved when their fathers' boats were only a little lower than the drawings.

Between the third and fourth degrees of latitude, Humboldt observed in the Atabapo, the Temi, the Tuamini, and the Guainia, the “enigmatical phenomenon of the so-called black-water." The color of these rivers is a coffee-brown, which, in the shade of the palm groves, passes into ink-black, though in transparent vessels the water has a golden yellow color. This black color of the water is ascribed by our author to its holding in solution carburetted hydrogen," to the luxuriance of the tropical vegetation, and to the quantity of plants and herbs upon the ground over which the rivers flow." The ink-bluckness mentioned by Humboldt, arises, as he states, from the groves of palm when reflected from the aqueous surface, a phenomenon which we have frequently seen even under a more remarkable aspect in the lakes which exist in the Grampian range near the banks of the Spey. When these lakes, seen from above, reflect from their unruffled surface only the purple flanks of the hills covered with heath or with pine, the light which reaches the eye is exceedingly faint, and almost inappreciable, not only from the darkness of its tint, but from the smallness of its angle of incidence upon the reflecting surface. Under these circumstances, the lake literally is as black as ink; but if the slightest breeze forms a ripple on a portion of its surface, the inclined faces of the tiny waves reflect the light of the sky or of the clouds, and the portion of the lake thus disturbed has the appearance of milk, so that the sheet of water seems to be formed of ink and of milk in immiscible proximity. The slight coffee-500 feet wide, leaving only an open channel of brown color of some of our own streams, is obviously occasioned by the peaty soil over which they flow.

The phenomenon exhibited on the banks of this remarkable river (the Orinoco) cannot fail to command the admiration of the traveller. Near the

The cataracts, or Raudal of Maypures, are not, like the falls of Niagara, formed by the descent of a mass of water through a great height, nor are they narrow gorges through which the river rushes with accelerated velocity. They consist of a countless number of little cascades, succeeding each other like steps, sometimes extending across the entire bed of the river, and sometimes in a river

twenty feet. When the steps are but two or three feet high, the natives can descend the falls, remaining in the canoe. When the steps are high, and stretch across the stream, the boat is landed and dragged along the bank by branches of trees placed under it as rollers.

In descending from the village of Maypures to the Rock of Manimi in the bed of the river, a wonderful prospect opens to the traveller's view.

*

quite similar to those which cover the walls of the
Mexican palace at Mitla. They are found in all
countries and climates, and in the most different
stages of human cultivation-among the Greeks and
Romans, as well as on the shields of some of the
natives at Tahiti, and other islands of the South
Sea-wherever the eye is gratified by the rhyth-
mical recurrence of regular forms.
Our interpreters could give us no certain informa-
tion as to the age of these vessels; that of the skel-
etons appeared for the most part not to exceed a
century. It is reported among the Guareca Indians,
that the brave Atures being pressed upon by the
cannibal Caribs, withdrew to the rocks of the cata-
racts-a melancholy refuge and dwelling-place, in
which the distressed tribe finally perished, and with
them their language. In the most inaccessible

A foaming surface, four miles in length, presents itself at once to the eye. Iron-black masses of rocks, resembling ruins and battlemented towers, rise frowning from the waters. Rocks and islands are adorned with the luxuriant vegetation of the tropical forest; a perpetual mist hovers over the waters, and the summits of the lofty palms pierce through the cloud of spray and vapor. When the rays of the glowing evening sun are refracted in these humid exhalations, a magic optical effect begins. Colored bows shine, vanish, and reappear; and the ethereal image is swayed to and fro by the breath of the sportive breeze. During the long rainy season the streaming waters bring down islands of veg-parts of the Raudal there are cavities and recesses etable mould, and thus the naked rocks are studded with bright flower-beds, adorned with melastomas and droseras, and with small silver-leaved mimosas and ferns. These spots recall to the recollection of the European those blocks of granite decked with flowers which rise solitary amid the glaciers of Savoy, and are called, by the dwellers in the Alps, "jardins," or "courtils." In the blue distance the eye rests on the mountain chain of Cunavami, a long extended ridge, which terminates abruptly in a truncated cone. We saw the latter glowing at sunset as if in roseate flames. This appearance returns daily. No one has ever been near the mountain to detect the precise cause of this brightness, which may perhaps proceed from a reflecting surface produced by the decomposition of tale or mica slate.-Vol. i., pp. 224, 225.

which have served, like the Cave of Ataruipe, as burying-places. It is even probable that the last family of the Atures may not have been long deceased; for (a singular fact) there is still in Maypures an old parrot, of whom the natives affirm that he is not understood because he speaks the Ature language.-Vol. i., pp. 229, 230.

Leaving this interesting cave at nightfall, and carrying along with him several skulls, and an entire skeleton, our author could not avoid tracing a melancholy contrast between the extinct race, whose mouldering relics he bore, with the ever new life which springs from the bosom of the earth :—

Countless insects poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire, as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk down upon the turf. Climbing bignoterias adorned the entrance of the cave, and the nias, fragrant vanillas, and yellow flowering banis

The Raudal of Atures is, like that of the Maypures, a cluster of islands, between which the river forces its way for ten or twelve thousand yards, a forest of palms rising from the middle of its foam-summits of the palms rustled above the graves. ing waters. Near the southern entrance of this cataract, and on the right bank of the river, stands the celebrated Cave of Ataruipe. It consists of a cavity or vaulted roof, formed by a far overhanging cliff," and is the vault or cemetery of an extinct nation.

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Thus perish the generations of men! Thus do the name and the traces of nations fade and disappear! Yet when one blossom of man's intellect withers-when in the storms of time the memorials of his art moulder and decay-an ever new life springs forth from the bosom of the earth; maternal nature unfolds unceasingly her germs, her flowers, and her fruits; regardless though man, with his passions and his crimes, treads under foot her ripening harvests.-Vol. i., p. 231.

The

We counted (says our author) about 600 well preserved skeletons, placed in as many baskets, woven from the stalks of palm leaves. These baskets, which the Indians call mapires, are shaped The third aspect of nature to which Baron like square sacks, differing in size according to the Humboldt directs our attention is the Nocturnal age of the deceased. Even new-born children had Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest. each its own mapire. The skeletons are so perfect, that not a bone or a joint is wanting. The bones wooded region which lies between 8° of north had been prepared in three different ways; some and 19° of south latitude is one connected forest bleached, some colored red with onoto, the pigment having an area twelve times greater than that of of the bixa orellana, and some like mummies, closely Germany. This vast surface is watered by sysenveloped in sweet-smelling resin and plantain leaves. The Indians assured us that the custom had been to bury the fresh corpses for some months in damp earth, which gradually consumed the flesh; they were then dug up, and any remaining flesh scraped away with sharp stones. This the Indians said was still the practice of several tribes in Guiana. Besides the mapires, or baskets, we found urns of half-burnt clay, which appeared to contain the bones of entire families. The larger of these urns were about three feet high, and nearly six feet long, of a pleasing oval form, and greenish color, having handles shaped like snakes and crocodiles, and meandering or labyrinthine ornaments round the upper margin. These ornaments are

tems of rivers, whose tributaries sometimes exceed in the abundance of their waters the Rhine or the Danube; and it is to the combination of great moisture with a tropical heat that these forests owe the luxuriant growth of their trees. So rank indeed is their vegetation, that particular parts of the forest are impenetrable; and the large American tigers, or panther-like jaguars, often lose themselves in their dense and impenetrable recesses. Being thus unable to hunt on the ground, they actually live on the trees, and become the terror of the families of monkeys, and of the prehensile-tailed viverræ.

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