Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 8 of 332 - First - Home
It Is Curious To Observe In The Lowest Degree Of
Human Civilization The Existence Of A Whole Tribe Depending On One
Single Species Of Palm-Tree, Similar To Those Insects Which Feed On
One And The Same Flower, Or On One And The Same Part Of A Plant.
The navigation of the river, whether vessels arrive by the Boca de
Navios, or risk entering the labyrinth of the bocas chicas, requires
various precautions, according as the waters are high or low.
The
regularity of these periodical risings of the Orinoco has been long an
object of admiration to travellers, as the overflowings of the Nile
furnished the philosophers of antiquity with a problem difficult to
solve. The Orinoco and the Nile, contrary to the direction of the
Ganges, the Indus, the Rio de la Plata, and the Euphrates, flow alike
from the south toward the north; but the sources of the Orinoco are
five or six degrees nearer to the equator than those of the Nile.
Observing every day the accidental variations of the atmosphere, we
find it difficult to persuade ourselves that in a great space of time
the effects of these variations mutually compensate each other: that
in a long succession of years the averages of the temperature of the
humidity, and of the barometric pressure, differ so little from month
to month; and that nature, notwithstanding the multitude of partial
perturbations, follows a constant type in the series of meteorological
phenomena. Great rivers unite in one receptacle the waters which a
surface of several thousand square leagues receives. However unequal
may be the quantity of rain that falls during several successive
years, in such or such a valley, the swellings of rivers that have a
very long course are little affected by these local variations. The
swellings represent the average of the humidity that reigns in the
whole basin; they follow annually the same progression because their
commencement and their duration depend also on the mean of the
periods, apparently extremely variable, of the beginning and end of
the rains in the different latitudes through which the principal trunk
and its various tributary streams flow. Hence it follows that the
periodical oscillations of rivers are, like the equality of
temperature of caverns and springs, a sensible indication of the
regular distribution of humidity and heat, which takes place from year
to year on a considerable extent of land. They strike the imagination
of the vulgar; as order everywhere astonishes, when we cannot easily
ascend to first causes. Rivers that belong entirely to the torrid zone
display in their periodical movements that wonderful regularity which
is peculiar to a region where the same wind brings almost always
strata of air of the same temperature; and where the change of the sun
in its declination causes every year at the same period a rupture of
equilibrium in the electric intensity, in the cessation of the
breezes, and the commencement of the season of rains. The Orinoco, the
Rio Magdalena, and the Congo or Zaire are the only great rivers of the
equinoctial region of the globe, which, rising near the equator, have
their mouths in a much higher latitude, though still within the
tropics.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 8 of 332
Words from 3744 to 4278
of 174507