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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In The Province Of Caracas,
Where 562 Cubic Feet Of The Plant Slightly Piled Up Yield
Thirty-Five Or Forty Pounds Of Dry Indigo, The Liquid Does Not Pass
Into The Beater Till After Twenty, Thirty, Or Thirty-Five Hours.
It
is probable that the inhabitants of Cumanacoa would extract more
colouring matter if they left the plants longer
Steeping in the
first vat.* (* The planters are pretty generally of opinion, that
the fermentation should never continue less than ten hours.
Beauvais-Raseau, Art de l'Indigotier page 81.) During my abode at
Cumana I made solutions of the indigo of Cumanacoa, which is
somewhat heavy and coppery, and that of Caracas, in sulphuric acid,
in order to compare them, and the solution of the former appeared
to me to be of a much more intense blue.
The plain of Cumanacoa, spotted with farms and small plantations of
indigo and tobacco, is surrounded with mountains, which towards the
south rise to considerable height. Everything indicates that the
valley is the bottom of an ancient lake. The mountains, which in
ancient times formed its shores, all rise perpendicularly in the
direction of the plain. The only outlet for the waters of the lake
was on the side of Arenas. In digging foundations, beds of round
pebbles, mixed with small bivalve shells, are found; and according
to the report of persons worthy of credit, there were discovered,
thirty years ago, at the bottom of the ravine of San Juanillo, two
enormous femoral bones, four feet long, and weighing more than
thirty pounds. The Indians imagined that these were giants' bones;
whilst the half-learned sages of the country, who assume the right
of explaining everything, gravely asserted that they were mere
sports of nature, and little worthy of attention; an opinion
founded on the circumstance that human bones decay rapidly in the
soil of Cumanacoa. In order to decorate their churches on the
festival of the dead, they take skulls from the cemeteries on the
coast, where the earth is impregnated with saline substances. These
pretended thigh-bones of giants were carried to the port of Cumana,
where I sought for them in vain; but from the analogy of some
fossil bones which I brought from other parts of South America, and
which have been carefully examined by M. Cuvier, it is probable
that the gigantic femoral bones of Cumanacoa belonged to elephants
of a species now extinct. It may appear surprising that they were
found in a place so little elevated above the present level of the
waters; since it is a remarkable fact, that the fragments of the
mastodons and fossil elephants which I brought from the equinoctial
regions of Mexico, New Grenada, Quito, and Peru, were not found in
low regions (as were the megatherium of Rio Luxan* (* One league
south-east from the town of Buenos Ayres.) and Virginia,* (* The
megatherium of Virginia is the megalonyx of Mr. Jefferson. All the
enormous remains found in the plains of the new continent, either
north or south of the equator, belong, not to the torrid, but to
the temperate zone.
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