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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No Observation Of A Star Helped Me To Fix
The Latitude Within The Space Of A Degree.
After having passed the
point where the Itinivini separates from the Cassiquiare, to take its
course to the west towards the granitic hills of Daripabo, we found
the marshy banks of the river covered with bamboos.
These arborescent
gramina rise to the height of twenty feet; their stem is constantly
arched towards the summit. It is a new species of Bambusa with very
broad leaves. M. Bonpland fortunately found one in flower; a
circumstance I mention, because the genera Nastus and Bambusa had
before been very imperfectly distinguished, and nothing is more rare
in the New World, than to see these gigantic gramina in flower. N.
Mutis herborised during twenty years in a country where the Bambusa
guadua forms marshy forests several leagues broad, without having ever
been able to procure the flowers. We sent that learned naturalist the
first ears of Bambusa from the temperate valleys of Popayan. It is
strange that the parts of fructification should develop themselves so
rarely in a plant which is indigenous, and which vegetates with such
extraordinary rigour, from the level of the sea to the height of nine
hundred toises, that is, to a subalpine region the climate of which,
between the tropics, resembles that of the south of Spain. The Bambusa
latifolia seems to be peculiar to the basins of the Upper Orinoco, the
Cassiquiare, and the Amazon; it is a social plant, like all the
gramina of the family of the nastoides; but in that part of Spanish
Guiana which we traversed it does not grow in those large masses which
the Spanish Americans call guadales, or forests of bamboos.
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