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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With The
Cyathea Grow, On The Mountain Of Santa Maria, Rhexia Juniperina,
Chiococca Racemosa, And Commelina Spicata.) We Discovered Here,
And
in the valley of Caripe, five new kinds of arborescent ferns.* (*
Meniscium arborescens, Aspidium caducum, A. rostratum, Cyathea
villosa,
And C. speciosa.) In the time of Linnaeus, botanists knew
no more than four on both continents.
We observed that the fern-trees are in general much more rare than
the palm-trees. Nature has confined them to temperate, moist, and
shady places. They shun the direct rays of the sun, and while the
pumos, the corypha of the steppes and other palms of America,
flourish on the barren and burning plains, these ferns with
arborescent trunks, which at a distance look like palm-trees,
preserve the character and habits of cryptogamous plants. They love
solitary places, little light, moist, temperate and stagnant air.
If they sometimes descend towards the sea-coast, it is only under
cover of a thick shade. The old trunks of the cyathea and the
meniscium are covered with a carbonaceous powder, which, probably
being deprived of hydrogen, has a metallic lustre like plumbago. No
other plant presents this phenomenon; for the trunks of the
dicotyledons, in spite of the heat of the climate, and the
intensity of the light, are less burnt within the tropics than in
the temperate zone. It may be said that the trunks of the ferns,
which, like the monocotyledons, are enlarged by the remains of the
petioles, decay from the circumference to the centre; and that,
deprived of the cortical organs through which the elaborated juices
descend to the roots, they are burnt more easily by the action of
the oxygen of the atmosphere.
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