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 Grows
Spontaneously On The Banks Of The Cassiquiare.) We Saw Wild Indigo
Around The Missions Of San Miguel De Davipe, San Carlos, And
Mandavaca.
No doubt can exist that several nations of America,
particularly the Mexicans, long before the conquest, employed real
indigo in their hieroglyphic paintings; and that small cakes of this
substance were sold at the great market of Tenochtitlan.
But a
colouring matter, chemically identical, may be extracted from plants
belonging to neighbouring genera; and I should not at present venture
to affirm that the native indigoferae of America do not furnish some
generic difference from the Indigofera anil, and the Indigofera
argentea of the Old World. In the coffee-trees of both hemispheres
this difference has been observed.
Here, as at the Rio Negro, the humidity of the air, and the consequent
abundance of insects, are obstacles almost invincible to new
cultivation. Everywhere you meet with those large ants that march in
close bands, and direct their attacks the more readily on cultivated
plants, because they are herbaceous and succulent, whilst the forests
of these countries afford only plants with woody stalks. If a
missionary wishes to cultivate salad, or any culinary plant of Europe,
he is compelled as it were to suspend his garden in the air. He fills
an old boat with good mould, and, having sown the seed, suspends it
four feet above the ground with cords of the chiquichiqui palm-tree;
but most frequently places it on a slight scaffolding. This protects
the young plants from weeds, worms, and those ants which pursue their
migration in a right line, and, not knowing what vegetates above them,
seldom turn from their course to climb up stakes that are stripped of
their bark.
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