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 Tree Looks As If It Were
Supported By Buttresses.
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.
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