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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These Plains Would
Serve As Natural Boundaries Like The Seas Or The Virgin Forests Of The
Tropics, Were It Not That Armies Can Cross Them With Greater Facility,
As Their Innumerable Troops Of Horses And Mules And Herds Of Oxen
Furnish Every Means Of Conveyance And Subsistence.
What we have seen of the power of man struggling against the force of
nature in Gaul, in Germany and recently (but still beyond the tropics)
in the United States, scarcely affords any just measure of what we may
expect from the progress of civilization in the torrid zone.
Forests
disappear but very slowly by fire and the axe when the trunks of trees
are from eight to ten feet in diameter; when in falling they rest one
upon another, and the wood, moistened by almost continual rains, is
excessively hard. The planters who inhabit the Llanos or Pampas do not
generally admit the possibility of subjecting the soil to cultivation;
it is a problem not yet solved. Most of the savannahs of Venezuela
have not the same advantage as those of North America. The latter are
traversed longitudinally by three great rivers, the Missouri, the
Arkansas, and the Red River of Nachitoches; the savannahs of Araura,
Calabozo, and Pao are crossed in a transverse direction only by the
tributary streams of the Orinoco, the most westerly of which (the
Cari, the Pao, the Acaru, and the Manapire) have very little water in
the season of drought. These streams scarcely flow at all toward the
north; so that in the centre of the Llanos there remain vast tracts of
land called bancos and mesas* frightfully parched. (* The Spanish
words banco and mesa signify literally bench and table. In the Llanos
of South America little elevations rising slightly above the general
elevation of the plain are called bancos and mesas from their supposed
resemblance to benches and tables.) The eastern parts, fertilized by
the Portuguesa, the Masparro, and the Orivante, and by the tributary
streams of those three rivers, are most susceptible of cultivation.
The soil is sand mixed with clay, covering a bed of quartz pebbles.
The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants,
is everywhere extremely thin. It is scarcely augmented by the fall of
the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less
periodically regular than in temperate climates. During thousands of
years the Llanos have been destitute of trees and brushwood; a few
scattered palms in the savannah add little to that hydruret of carbon,
that extractive matter, which, according to the experiments of
Saussure, Davy, and Braconnot, gives fertility to the soil. The social
plants which almost exclusively predominate in the steppes, are
monocotyledons; and it is known how much grasses impoverish the soil
into which their fibrous roots penetrate. This action of the
killingias, paspalums and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere
the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth this varies
according as it rests on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and
gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud
on the lower grounds or as the shock of the waters carries away from
the small elevations the little soil that has covered them.
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