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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The Tamanoir Of Buffon
Is Called Uaraca By The Indians; It Is Irascible And Courageous, Which
Is Extraordinary In An Animal Without Teeth.
We found, as we advanced,
some vistas in the forest, which appeared to us the richer, as it
became more accessible.
We here gathered some new species of coffee
(the American tribe, with flowers in panicles, forms probably a
particular genus); the Galega piscatorum, of which the Indians make
use, as they do of jacquinia, and of a composite plant of the Rio
Temi, as a kind of barbasco, to intoxicate fish; and finally, the
liana, known in those countries by the name of vejuco de mavacure,
which yields the famous curare poison. It is neither a phyllanthus,
nor a coriaria, as M. Willdenouw conjectured, but, as M. Kunth's
researches show, very probably a strychnos. We shall have occasion,
farther on, to speak of this venomous substance, which is an important
object of trade among the savages.
The trees of the forest of Pimichin have the gigantic height of from
eighty to a hundred and twenty feet. In these burning climates the
laurineae and amyris* (* The great white and red cedars of these
countries are not the Cedrela odorata, but the Amyris altissima, which
is an icica of Aublet.) furnish that fine timber for building, which,
on the north-west coast of America, on mountains where the thermometer
falls in winter to 20 degrees centigrade below zero, we find in the
family of the coniferae. Such, in every zone, and in all the families
of American plants, is the prodigious force of vegetation, that, in
the latitude of fifty-seven degrees north, on the same isothermal line
with St. Petersburgh and the Orkneys, the Pinus canadensis displays
trunks one hundred and fifty feet high, and six feet in diameter.* (*
Langsdorf informs us that the inhabitants of Norfolk Sound make boats
of a single trunk, fifty feet long, four feet and a half broad, and
three high at the sides.
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