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 Scaffolding However Does Not
Penetrate Very Deep Into The Earth.
The lateral roots wind at the
surface of the ground, and if at twenty feet distance from the
trunk
They are cut with a hatchet, we see gushing out the milky
juice of the fig-tree, which, when deprived of the vital influence
of the organs of the tree, is altered and coagulates. What a
wonderful combination of cells and vessels exist in these vegetable
masses, in these gigantic trees of the torrid zone, which without
interruption, perhaps during the space of a thousand years, prepare
nutritious fluids, raise them to the height of one hundred and
eighty feet, convey them down again to the ground, and conceal,
beneath a rough and hard bark, under inanimate layers of ligneous
matter, all the movements of organic life!
I availed myself of the clearness of the nights, to observe at the
plantation of Tuy two emersions of the first and third satellites
of Jupiter. These two observations gave, according to the tables of
Delambre, longitude 4 hours 39 minutes 14 seconds; and by the
chronometer I found 4 hours 39 minutes 10 seconds. During my stay
in the valleys of the Tuy and Aragua the zodiacal light appeared
almost every night with extraordinary brilliancy. I had perceived
it for the first time between the tropics at Caracas, on the 18th
of January, after seven in the evening. The point of the pyramid
was at the height of 53 degrees. The light totally disappeared at
9 hours 35 minutes (apparent time), nearly 3 hours 50 minutes after
sunset, without any diminution in the serenity of the sky. La Caille,
in his voyage to Rio Janeiro and the Cape, was struck with the
beautiful appearance displayed by the zodiacal light within the
tropics, not so much on account of its less inclined position,
as of the greater transparency of the air.* (* The great serenity
of the air caused this phenomenon to be remarked, in 1668, in the
arid plains of Persia.) It may appear singular, that Childrey and
Dominic Cassini, navigators who were well acquainted with the seas
of the two Indies, did not at a much earlier period direct the
attention of scientific Europe to this light, and its regular form
and progress. Until the middle of the eighteenth century mariners
were little interested by anything not having immediate relation
to the course of a ship, and the demands of navigation.
However brilliant the zodiacal light in the dry valley of Tuy, I
have observed it more beautiful still at the back of the
Cordilleras of Mexico, on the banks of the lake of Tezcuco, eleven
hundred and sixty toises above the surface of the ocean. In the
month of January, 1804, the light rose sometimes to more than 60
degrees above the horizon. The Milky Way appeared to grow pale
compared with the brilliancy of the zodiacal light; and if small,
bluish, scattered clouds were accumulated toward the west, it
seemed as if the moon were about to rise.
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