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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This Longitude Is Founded On The Difference Of Time, On
Lunar Distances, On The Eclipse Of The Sun (On The 28th Of October,
1799), And On Ten Immersions Of Jupiter's Satellites, Compared With
Observations Made In Europe.
The oldest chart we have of the
continent, that of Don Diego Ribeiro, geographer to the emperor
Charles the
Fifth, places Cumana in latitude 9 degrees 30 minutes;
which differs fifty-eight minutes from the real latitude, and half
a degree from that marked by Jefferies in his American Pilot,
published in 1794. During three centuries the whole of the coast
of Terra Firma has been laid down too far to the south: this has
been owing to the current near the island of Trinidad, which sets
toward the north, and mariners are led by their dead-reckoning to
think themselves farther south than they really are.
On the 17th of August a halo round the moon fixed the attention of
the inhabitants of Cumana, who considered it as the presage of some
violent earthquake; for, according to popular notions, all
extraordinary phenomena are immediately connected with each other.
Coloured circles around the moon are much more rare in northern
countries than in Provence, Italy, and Spain. They are seen
particularly (and this fact is singular enough) when the sky is
clear, and the weather seems to be most fair and settled. Under the
torrid zone beautiful prismatic colours appear almost every night,
and even at the time of the greatest droughts; often in the space
of a few minutes they disappear several times, because, doubtless,
the superior currents change the state of the floating vapours, by
which the light is refracted.
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