Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Roofs And
Walls Are Covered With Canary House-Leek And Those Elegant
Trichomanes, Mentioned By Every Traveller.
These plants are
nourished by the abundant mists.
Mr. Anderson, the naturalist in the third voyage of captain Cook,
advises physicians to send their patients to Teneriffe, on account
of the mildness of the temperature and the equal climate of the
Canaries. The ground on these islands rises in an amphitheatre, and
presents simultaneously, as in Peru and Mexico, the temperature of
every climate, from the heat of Africa to the cold of the higher
Alps. Santa Cruz, the port of Orotava, the town of the same name,
and that of Laguna, are four places, the mean temperatures of which
form a descending series. In the south of Europe the change of the
seasons is too sensibly felt to present the same advantages.
Teneriffe, on the contrary, situated as it were on the threshold of
the tropics, though but a few days' sail from Spain, shares in the
charms which nature has lavished on the equinoctial regions.
Vegetation here displays some of her fairest and most majestic
forms in the banana and the palm-tree. He who is alive to the
charms of nature finds in this delicious island remedies still more
potent than the climate. No abode appeared to me more fitted to
dissipate melancholy, and restore peace to the perturbed mind, than
that of Teneriffe or Madeira. These advantages are the effect not
of the beauty of the site and the purity of the air alone:
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