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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In The Fertile
District Of Adexe Only, Where The Plantations Of The Sugar-Cane Are
Most Considerable, Camels Have Sometimes Been Known To Breed.
These
beasts of burden, as well as horses, were brought into the Canary
Islands in the fifteenth century by the Norman conquerors.
The
Guanches were previously unacquainted with them; and this fact
seems to be very well accounted for by the difficulty of
transporting an animal of such bulk in frail canoes, without the
necessity of considering the Guanches as a remnant of the people of
Atlantis, or a different race from that of the western Africans.
The hill, on which the town of San Christobal de la Laguna is
built, belongs to the system of basaltic mountains, which,
independent of the system of less ancient volcanic rocks, form a
broad girdle around the peak of Teneriffe. The basalt on which we
walked was darkish brown, compact, half-decomposed, and when
breathed on, emitted a clayey smell. We discovered amphibole,
olivine,* (* Peridot granuliforme. Hauy.) and translucid pyroxenes,
* (* Augite. - Werner.) with a perfectly lamellar fracture, of a
pale olive green, and often crystallized in prisms of six planes.
The first of these substances is extremely rare at Teneriffe; and I
never found it in the lavas of Vesuvius; but those of Etna contain
it in abundance. Notwithstanding the great number of blocks, which
we stopped to break, to the great regret of our guides, we could
discover neither nepheline, leucite,* (* Amphigene. - Hauy.) nor
feldspar. This last, which is so common in the basaltic lavas of
the island of Ischia, does not begin to appear at Teneriffe, till
we approach the volcano. The rock of Laguna is not columnar, but is
divided into ledges, of small thickness, and inclined to the east
at an angle of 30 or 40 degrees. It has nowhere the appearance of a
current of lava flowing from the sides of the peak. If the present
volcano has given birth to these basalts, we must suppose, that,
like the substances which compose the Somma, at the back of
Vesuvius, they are the effect of a submarine effusion, in which the
liquid mass has formed strata. A few arborescent Euphorbias, the
Cacalia Kleinia, and Indian figs (Cactus), which have become wild
in the Canary Islands, as well as in the south of Europe and the
whole continent of Africa, are the only plants we see on these arid
rocks. The feet of our mules were slipping every moment on beds of
stone, which were very steep. We nevertheless recognized the
remains of an ancient pavement. In these colonies we discover at
every step some traces of that activity which characterized the
Spanish nation in the 16th century.
As we approached Laguna, we felt the temperature of the atmosphere
gradually become lower. This sensation was so much the more
agreeable, as we found the air of Santa Cruz very oppressive. As
our organs are more affected by disagreeable impressions, the
change of temperature becomes still more sensible when we return
from Laguna to the port:
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