Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It was the first storm and the first
rain of the season.
The river was swelled by the easterly wind; but it
soon became calm, and then some great cetacea, much resembling the
porpoises of our seas, began to play in long files on the surface of
the water. The slow and indolent crocodiles seem to dread the
neighbourhood of these animals, so noisy and impetuous in their
evolutions, for we saw them dive whenever they approached. It is a
very extraordinary phenomenon to find cetacea at such a distance from
the coast. The Spaniards of the Missions designate them, as they do
the porpoises of the ocean, by the name of toninas. The Tamanacs call
them orinucna. They are three or four feet long; and bending their
back, and pressing with their tail on the inferior strata of the
water, they expose to view a part of the back and of the dorsal fin. I
did not succeed in obtaining any, though I often engaged Indians to
shoot at them with their arrows. Father Gili asserts that the Gumanos
eat their flesh. Are these cetacea peculiar to the great rivers of
South America, like the manatee, which, according to Cuvier, is also a
fresh water cetaceous animal? or must we admit that they go up from
the sea against the current, as the beluga sometimes does in the
rivers of Asia? What would lead me to doubt this last supposition is,
that we saw toninas above the great cataracts of the Orinoco, in the
Rio Atabapo. Did they penetrate into the centre of equinoctial America
from the mouth of the Amazon, by the communication of that river with
the Rio Negro, the Cassiquiare, and the Orinoco? They are found here
at all seasons, and nothing seems to denote that they make periodical
migrations like salmon.
While the thunder rolled around us, the sky displayed only scattered
clouds, that advanced slowly toward the zenith, and in an opposite
direction. The hygrometer of Deluc was at 53 degrees, the centigrade
thermometer 23.7 degrees, and Saussure's hygrometer 87.5 degrees. The
electrometer gave no sign of electricity. As the storm gathered, the
blue of the sky changed at first to deep azure and then to grey. The
vesicular vapour became visible, and the thermometer rose three
degrees, as is almost always the case, within the tropics, from a
cloudy sky which reflects the radiant heat of the soil. A heavy rain
fell. Being sufficiently habituated to the climate not to fear the
effect of tropical rains, we remained on the shore to observe the
electrometer. I held it more than twenty minutes in my hand, six feet
above the ground, and observed that in general the pith-balls
separated only a few seconds before the lightning was seen. The
separation was four lines. The electric charge remained the same
during several minutes; and having time to determine the nature of the
electricity, by approaching a stick of sealing-wax, I saw here what I
had often observed on the ridge of the Andes during a storm, that the
electricity of the atmosphere was first positive, then nil, and then
negative.
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