Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Influence Of The
Equinoctial Climate, Everywhere Else So Vivifying, Is Not Felt In
Places Where The Great Associations Of Gramina Almost Exclude Every
Other Plant.
Judging from the aspect of the soil we might have
believed ourselves to be in the temperate zone and
Even still farther
northward but that a few scattered palms, and at nightfall the fine
constellations of the southern sky (the Centaur, Canopus, and the
innumerable nebulae with which the Ship is resplendent), reminded us
that we were only eight degrees distant from the equator.
A phenomenon which fixed the attention of De Luc and which in these
latter years has furnished a subject of speculation to geologists,
occupied us much during our journey across the Llanos. I allude not to
those blocks of primitive rock which occur, as in the Jura, on the
slope of limestone mountains, but to those enormous blocks of granite
and syenite which, in limits very distinctly marked by nature, are
found scattered on the north of Holland, Germany and the countries of
the Baltic. It seems to be now proved that, distributed as in radii,
they came at the time of the ancient revolutions of our globe from the
Scandinavian peninsula southward; and that they did not primitively
belong to the granitic chains of the Harz and Erzgeberg, which they
approach without, however, reaching their foot.* (* Leopold von Buch,
Voyage en Norwege volume 1 page 30.) I was surprised at not seeing one
of these blocks in the Llanos of Venezuela, though these immense
plains are bounded on the south by the Sierra Parima, a group of
mountains entirely granitic and exhibiting in its denticulated and
often columnar peaks traces of the most violent destruction.
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