Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 88 of 406 - First - Home
In The
Austrian Monarchy, The Number Of Oxen, Cows, And Calves, Has Been
Estimated At 13,400,000 Head.
Paris alone consumes annually 155,000
horned cattle.
Germany receives 150,000 oxen yearly from Hungary.
Domestic animals, collected in small herds, are considered by
agricultural nations as a secondary object in the riches of the state.
Accordingly they strike the imagination much less than those wandering
droves of oxen and horses which alone fill the uncultivated tracts of
the New World. Civilization and social order favour alike the progress
of population, and the multiplication of animals useful to man.
We found at Calabozo, in the midst of the Llanos, an electrical
machine with large plates, electrophori, batteries, electrometers; an
apparatus nearly as complete as our first scientific men in Europe
possess. All these articles had not been purchased in the United
States; they were the work of a man who had never seen any instrument,
who had no person to consult, and who was acquainted with the
phenomena of electricity only by reading the treatise of De Lafond,
and Franklin's Memoirs. Senor Carlos del Pozo, the name of this
enlightened and ingenious man, had begun to make cylindrical
electrical machines, by employing large glass jars, after having cut
off the necks. It was only within a few years he had been able to
procure, by way of Philadelphia, two plates, to construct a plate
machine, and to obtain more considerable effects. It is easy to judge
what difficulties Senor Pozo had to encounter, since the first works
upon electricity had fallen into his hands, and that he had the
courage to resolve to procure himself, by his own industry, all that
he had seen described in his books. Till now he had enjoyed only the
astonishment and admiration produced by his experiments on persons
destitute of all information, and who had never quitted the solitude
of the Llanos; our abode at Calabozo gave him a satisfaction
altogether new. It may be supposed that he set some value on the
opinions of two travellers who could compare his apparatus with those
constructed in Europe. I had brought with me electrometers mounted
with straw, pith-balls, and gold-leaf; also a small Leyden jar which
could be charged by friction according to the method of Ingenhousz,
and which served for my physiological experiments. Senor del Pozo
could not contain his joy on seeing for the first time instruments
which he had not made, yet which appeared to be copied from his own.
We also showed him the effect of the contact of heterogeneous metals
on the nerves of frogs. The name of Galvani and Volta had not
previously been heard in those vast solitudes.
Next to his electrical apparatus, the work of the industry and
intelligence of an inhabitant of the Llanos, nothing at Calabozo
excited in us so great an interest as the gymnoti, which are animated
electrical apparatuses. I was impatient, from the time of my arrival
at Cumana, to procure electrical eels.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 88 of 406
Words from 45621 to 46123
of 211397