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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Though Educated In A Country Which Has No Direct
Communication With Either The East Or The West Indies, Living
Amidst Mountains Remote From Coasts, And Celebrated For Their
Numerous Mines, I Felt An Increasing Passion For The Sea And
Distant Expeditions.
Objects with which we are acquainted only by
the animated narratives of travellers have a peculiar charm;
imagination wanders
With delight over that which is vague and
undefined; and the pleasures we are deprived of seem to possess a
fascinating power, compared with which all we daily feel in the
narrow circle of sedentary life appears insipid. The taste for
herborisation, the study of geology, rapid excursions to Holland,
England, and France, with the celebrated Mr. George Forster, who
had the happiness to accompany captain Cook in his second
expedition round the globe, contributed to give a determined
direction to the plan of travels which I had formed at eighteen
years of age. No longer deluded by the agitation of a wandering
life, I was anxious to contemplate nature in all her variety of
wild and stupendous scenery; and the hope of collecting some facts
useful to the advancement of science, incessantly impelled my
wishes towards the luxuriant regions of the torrid zone. As
personal circumstances then prevented me from executing the
projects by which I was so powerfully influenced, I had leisure to
prepare myself during six years for the observations I proposed to
make on the New Continent, as well as to visit different parts of
Europe, and to explore the lofty chain of the Alps, the structure
of which I might afterwards compare with that of the Andes of Quito
and of Peru.
I had traversed a part of Italy in 1795, but had not been able to
visit the volcanic regions of Naples and Sicily; and I regretted
leaving Europe without having seen Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna. I
felt, that in order to form a proper judgment of many geological
phenomena, especially of the nature of the rocks of trap-formation,
it was necessary to examine the phenomena presented by burning
volcanoes. I determined therefore to return to Italy in the month
of November, 1797. I made a long stay at Vienna, where the fine
collections of exotic plants, and the friendship of Messrs. de
Jacquin, and Joseph van der Schott, were highly useful to my
preparatory studies. I travelled with M. Leopold von Buch, through
several cantons of Salzburg and Styria, countries alike interesting
to the landscape-painter and the geologist; but just when I was
about to cross the Tyrolese Alps, the war then raging in Italy
obliged me to abandon the project of going to Naples.
A short time before, a gentleman passionately fond of the fine
arts, and who had visited the coasts of Greece and Illyria to
inspect their monuments, made me a proposal to accompany him in an
expedition to Upper Egypt. This expedition was to occupy only eight
months. Provided with astronomical instruments and able
draughtsmen, we were to ascend the Nile as far as Assouan, after
minutely examining the positions of the Said, between Tentyris and
the cataracts.
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