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 Nile And The Rio De La Plata Direct Their Course, In The
Two Opposite Hemispheres, From The Torrid Zone Towards The Temperate.*
(* In Asia, The Ganges, The Burrampooter, And The Majestic Rivers Of
Indo-China Direct Their Course Towards The Equator.
The former flow
from the temperate to the torrid zone.
This circumstance of courses
pursuing opposite directions (towards the equator, and towards the
temperate climates) has an influence on the period and the height of
the risings, on the nature and variety of the productions on the banks
of the rivers, on the less or greater activity of trade; and, I may
add, from what we know of the nations of Egypt, Merce, and India, on
the progress of civilization along the valleys of the rivers.)
As long as, confounding the Rio Paragua of Esmeralda with the Rio
Guaviare, the sources of the Orinoco were sought towards the
south-west, on the eastern back of the Andes, the risings of this
river were attributed to a periodical melting of the snows. This
reasoning was as far from the truth as that in which the Nile was
formerly supposed to be swelled by the waters of the snows of
Abyssinia. The Cordilleras of New Grenada, near which the western
tributary streams of the Orinoco, the Guaviare, the Meta, and the
Apure take their rise, enter no more into the limit of perpetual
snows, with the sole exception of the Paramos of Chita and Mucuchies,
than the Alps of Abyssinia. Snowy mountains are much more rare in the
torrid zone than is generally admitted; and the melting of the snows,
which is not copious there at any season, does not at all increase at
the time of the inundations of the Orinoco.
The cause of the periodical swellings of the Orinoco acts equally on
all the rivers that take rise in the torrid zone. After the vernal
equinox, the cessation of the breezes announces the season of rains.
The increase of the rivers (which may be considered as natural
pluviometers) is in proportion to the quantity of water that falls in
the different regions. This quantity, in the centre of the forests of
the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, appeared to me to exceed 90 or
100 inches annually. Such of the natives, therefore, as have lived
beneath the misty sky of the Esmeralda and the Atabapo, know, without
the smallest notion of natural philosophy, what Eudoxus and
Eratosthenes knew heretofore,* that the inundations of the great
rivers are owing solely to the equatorial rains. (* Strabo lib. 17
page 789. Diod. Sic. lib. l c. 5.) The following is the usual progress
of the oscillations of the Orinoco. Immediately after the vernal
equinox (the people say on the 25th of March) the commencement of the
rising is perceived. It is at first only an inch in twenty-four hours;
sometimes the river again sinks in April; it attains its maximum in
July; remains at the same level from the end of July till the 25th of
August; and then decreases progressively, but more slowly than it
increased.
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