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
Latter Is The Croton Sanguifluum Of Cumanacoa, Caripe, And Cariaco.
) The Red And Astringent Juice Of This Plant Is Employed To
Strengthen The Gums.
The Indians recognize the species by the
smell, and more particularly by chewing the woody fibres.
Two
natives, to whom the same wood was given to chew, pronounced
without hesitation the same name. We could avail ourselves but
little of the sagacity of our guides, for how could we procure
leaves, flowers, and fruits growing on trunks, the branches of
which commence at fifty or sixty feet high? We were struck at
finding in this hollow the bark of trees, and even the soil,
covered with moss* and lichens. (* Real musci frondosi. We also
found, besides a small Boletus stipitatus, of a snow-white colour,
the Boletus igniarius, and the Lycoperdon stellatum of Europe. I
had found this last only in very dry places in Germany and Poland.)
The cryptogamous plants are here as common as in northern
countries. Their growth is favoured by the moisture of the air, and
the absence of the direct rays of the sun. Nevertheless the
temperature is generally at 25 degrees in the day, and 19 degrees
at night.
The rocks which bound the crevice of Cuchivano are perpendicular
like walls, and are of the same calcareous formation which we
observed the whole way from Punta Delgada. It is here a blackish
grey, of compact fracture, tending sometimes towards the sandy
fracture, and crossed by small veins of white carbonated lime. In
these characteristic marks we thought we discovered the alpine
limestone of Switzerland and the Tyrol, of which the colour is
always deep, though in a less degree than that of the transition
limestone.* (* Escher, in the Alpina volume 4 page 340.) The first
of these formations constitutes the Cuchivano, the nucleus of the
Imposible, and in general the whole group of the mountains of New
Andalusia. I saw no petrifactions in it; but the inhabitants assert
that considerable masses of shells are found at great heights. The
same phenomenon occurs in the country about Salzburg.* (* In
Switzerland, the solitary beds of shells, at the height of from
1300 to 2000 toises (in the Jungfrauhorn, the Dent de Morcle, and
the Dent du Midi), belong to transition limestone.) At the
Cuchivano the alpine limestone contains beds of marly clay,*
(*Mergelschiefer.) three or four toises thick; and this geological
fact proves on the one hand the identity of the alpenkalkstein with
the zechstein of Thuringia, and on the other the affinity of
formation existing between the alpine limestone and that of the
Jura.* (* The Jura and the Alpine limestone are kindred formations,
and they are sometimes difficult to be distinguished, where they
lie immediately one upon another, as in the Apennines. The alpine
limestone and the zechstein, famous among the geologists of
Freyberg, are identical formations. This identity, which I noticed
in the year 1793 (Uber die Grubenwetter), is a geological fact the
more interesting, as it seems to unite the northern European
formations to those of the central chain.
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