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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I Found The Dip Of The Magnetic Needle, In The Great Square At
Carichana, 33.7 Degrees (New Division).
The intensity of the magnetic
action was expressed by two hundred and twenty-seven oscillations in
ten minutes of time; an increase of force that would seem to indicate
some local attraction.
Yet the blocks of the granite, blackened by the
waters of the Orinoco, have no perceptible action upon the needle.
The river had risen several inches during the day on the 10th of
April; this phenomenon surprised the natives so much the more, as the
first swellings are almost imperceptible, and are usually followed in
the month of April by a fall for some days. The Orinoco was already
three feet higher than the level of the lowest waters. The natives
showed us on a granite wall the traces of the great rise of the waters
of late years. We found them to be forty-two feet high, which is
double the mean rise of the Nile. But this measure was taken in a
place where the bed of the Orinoco is singularly hemmed in by rocks,
and I could only notice the marks shown me by the natives. It may
easily be conceived that the effect and the height of the increase
differs according to the profile of the river, the nature of the banks
more or less elevated, the number of rivers flowing in that collect
the pluvial waters, and the length of ground passed over. It is an
unquestionable fact that at Carichana, at San Borja, at Atures, and at
Maypures, wherever the river has forced its way through the mountains,
you see at a hundred, sometimes at a hundred and thirty feet, above
the highest present swell of the river, black bands and erosions, that
indicate the ancient levels of the waters.
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