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 Most Agreeable
Places For Herborizing Near Caracas Are The Ravines Of Tacagua,
Tipe, Cotecita, Catoche, Anauco, And Chacaito.) We
Were eight
hundred and thirty-five toises above the level of the ocean, which
is almost the height of Popayan;
But the mean temperature of this
place is probably only 17 or 18 degrees. The road over these
mountains is much frequented; we met continually long files of
mules and oxen; it is the great road leading from the capital to La
Victoria, and the valleys of Aragua. This road is cut out of a
talcose gneiss* in a state of decomposition. (* The direction of
the strata of gneiss varies; it is either hor. 3.4, dipping to the
north-west or hor. 8.2, dipping to the south-east.) A clayey soil
mixed with spangles of mica covered the rock, to the depth of three
feet. Travellers suffer from the dust in winter, while in the rainy
season the place is changed into a slough. On descending the
table-land of Buenavista, about fifty toises to the south-east, an
abundant spring, gushing from the gneiss, forms several cascades
surrounded with thick vegetation. The path leading to the spring is
so steep that we could touch with our hands the tops of the
arborescent ferns, the trunks of which reach a height of more than
twenty-five feet. The surrounding rocks are covered with
jungermannias and hypnoid mosses. The torrent, formed by the
spring, and shaded with heliconias, uncovers, as it falls, the
roots of the plumerias,* (* The red jasmine-tree, frangipanier of
the French West India Islands. The plumeria, so common in the
gardens of the Indians, has been very seldom found in a wild state.
It is mixed here with the Piper flagellare, the spadix of which
sometimes reaches three feet long. With the new kind of fig-tree
(which we have called Ficus gigantea, because it frequently attains
the height of a hundred feet), we find in the mountains of
Buenavista and of Los Teques, the Ficus nymphaeifolia of the garden
of Schonbrunn, introduced into our hot-houses by M. Bredemeyer. I
am certain of the identity of the species found in the same places;
but I doubt really whether it be really the F. nymphaeifolia of
Linnaeus, which is supposed to be a native of the East Indies.)
cupeys,* (* In the experiments I made at Caracas, on the air which
circulates in plants, I was struck with the fine appearance
presented by the petioles and leaves of the Clusia rosea, when cut
open under water, and exposed to the rays of the sun. Each trachea
gives out a current of gas, purer by 0.08 than atmospheric air. The
phenomenon ceases the moment the apparatus is placed in the shade.
There is only a very slight disengagement of air at the two
surfaces of the leaves of the clusia exposed to the sun without
being cut open. The gas enclosed in the capsules of the
Cardiospermum vesicarium appeared to me to contain the same
proportion of oxygen as the atmosphere, while that contained
between the knots, in the hollow of the stalk, is generally less
pure, containing only from 0.12 to 0.15 of oxygen.
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