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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Supposing That A Molecule Of Water Returns To
The Same Place From Which It Departed, We Can Estimate, From Our
Present Knowledge Of The Swiftness Of Currents, That This Circuit
Of 3800 Leagues Is Not Terminated In Less Than Two Years And Ten
Months.
A boat, which may be supposed to receive no impulsion from
the winds, would require thirteen months to go
From the Canary
Islands to the coast of Caracas, ten months to make the tour of the
gulf of Mexico and reach Tortoise Shoals opposite the port of the
Havannah, while forty or fifty days might be sufficient to carry it
from the straits of Florida to the bank of Newfoundland. It would
be difficult to fix the rapidity of the retrograde current from
this bank to the shores of Africa; estimating the mean velocity of
the waters at seven or eight miles in twenty-four hours, we may
allow ten or eleven months for this last distance. Such are the
effects of the slow but regular motion which agitates the waters of
the Atlantic. Those of the river Amazon take nearly forty-five days
to flow from Tomependa to Grand Para.
A short time before my arrival at Teneriffe, the sea had left in
the road of Santa Cruz the trunk of a cedrela odorata covered with
the bark. This American tree vegetates within the tropics, or in
the neighbouring regions. It had no doubt been torn up on the coast
of the continent, or of that of Honduras.
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