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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Men,
Whose Heads Were Covered With Great Calabashes Pierced With Holes, Hid
Themselves In The Water, And Seized The Birds By The Feet.
The
Chinese, from the remotest antiquity, have employed the cormorant, a
bird of the pelican family, for fishing on the coast:
Rings are fixed
round the bird's neck to prevent him from swallowing his prey and
fishing for himself. In the lowest degree of civilization, the
sagacity of man is displayed in the stratagems of hunting and fishing:
nations who probably never had any communication with each other
furnish the most striking analogies in the means they employ in
exercising their empire over animals.
Three days elapsed before we could emerge from the labyrinth of
Jardines and Jardinillos. At night we lay at anchor; and in the day we
visited those islands or chains of rocks which were most easily
accessible. As we advanced eastward the sea became less calm and the
position of the shoals was marked by water of a milky colour. On the
boundary of a sort of gulf between Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras
we found that the temperature of the sea, at its surface, augmented
suddenly from 23.5 to 25.8 degrees centigrade. The geologic
constitution of the rocky islets that rise around the island of Pinos
fixed my attention the more earnestly as I had always rather doubted
of the existence of those huge masses of coral which are said to rise
from the abyss of the Pacific to the surface of the water.
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