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 Banks Of The Cassiquiare Are Adorned With The Chiriva Palm-Tree
With Pinnate Leaves, Silvery On The Under Part.
The rest of the forest
furnishes only trees with large, coriaceous, glossy leaves, that have
plain edges.
This peculiar physiognomy* of the vegetation of the
Guainia, the Tuamini, and the Cassiquiare, is owing to the
preponderance of the families of the guttiferae, the sapotae, and the
laurineae, in the equatorial regions. (* This physiognomy struck us
forcibly, in the vast forests of Spanish Guiana, only between the
second and third degrees of north latitude.) The serenity of the sky
promising us a fine night, we resolved, at five in the evening, to
rest near the Piedra de Culimacari, a solitary granite rock, like all
those which I have described between the Atabapo and the Cassiquiare.
We found by the bearings of the sinuosities of the river, that this
rock is nearly in the latitude of the mission of San Francisco Solano.
In those desert countries, where man has hitherto left only fugitive
traces of his existence, I constantly endeavoured to make my
observations near the mouth of a river, or at the foot of a rock
distinguishable by its form. Such points only as are immutable by
their nature can serve for the basis of geographical maps. I obtained,
in the night of the 10th of May, a good observation of latitude by
alpha of the Southern Cross; the longitude was determined, but with
less precision, by the chronometer, taking the altitudes of the two
beautiful stars which shine in the feet of the Centaur.
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