Article, we felt ourselves authorized to treat some hasty speculations of this gentleman on the same subject. The analogy of a few scattered points of resemblance is no proof, he now admits, that they belong to the same stock; and, in fact, what would be thought of a philologist who should maintain the common origin of the language of the Incas and of the Hindoos, because he found, after minute investigation, three nearly corresponding words in the two languages-intai, munay, veypul, in that of the former, and indré, munya, vipulo, in that of the latter, signifying, respectively, the sun; love; great? The whole of this chapter is highly interesting, but our limits will not allow us to do it that justice which it deserves; and we must therefore content ourselves with extracting only the concluding paragraph. In speaking of the two great divisions of the people of the New World into the whites, which are the Esquimaux, and the copper-coloured, which include all the rest of this vast continent, he observes :

Those nations which have white skins begin their cosmogony with white men; according to them, negroes and dark-coloured people have been blackened or embrowned by the intense heat of the sun. This theory, adopted by the Greeks, though not without opposition, has descended to our own times. Buffon has repeated in prose what Theodectes said in verse two thousand years before," that nations wear the livery of the climates they inhabit." If history had been penned by negroes, they would have maintained, what Europeans themselves have latterly advanced, that man was originally black, or of a deep olive colour; that he became white in some races, by civilization and progressive deterioration, in the way that animals, in the domestic state, pass from dark to lighter shades. In plants and animals, accidental varieties, formed under our own eyes, are become fixed, and are propagated without alteration; but, in the present state of human organization, there is no proof of the different races of men, black, yellow, copper-coloured, and white deviating materially from the primitive type by the influence of climate, food, or other exterior agents.

I shall have occasion to resume these general remarks, when we ascend the vast table-lands of the Cordilleras, which are four or five times higher than the valley of Caripe. It is sufficient for my present purpose to rest on the testimony of Ulloa. This learned man has seen the Indians of Chili, of the Andes of Peru, of the scorching coasts of Panama, and also those of Louisiana which is situated under the northern temperate zone. He had the advantage of living at a period when theories were not so numerous as in the present day; and, like me, he was surprized at finding the indigenous native, 'under the line, as dark and swarthy in the cold region of the Cordilleras, as in the plains. When we observe differences of colour, they are peculiar to the race. We shall presently find, on the fiery banks of the Oronoco, Indians with skins inclining to white--est durans originis vis.'-501503.

On their return to Cumana, our travellers remained there a month, preparing for their long expedition on the Oronoco and

the

the Rio Negro; this afforded them an opportunity of observing an eclipse of the sun, which happened on the 28th of October, and of comparing the chronometer with its result. M. de Humboldt observes, that the days which preceded and which followed that of the eclipse of the sun presented some very remarkable atmospherical phenomena. It was what in these countries is called the season of winter; that is, of clouds and slight electric showers. From the 10th of October to the 3d of November a reddish vapour rose above the horizon and covered in a few minutes, as with a veil more or less dense, the whole azure vault of heaven-sometimes so light, that the stars near the zenith were seen to twinkle through it, and the spots on the disc of the moon were visible; but the hygrometer was in no way affected by these fogs.

From the 28th of October to the 3d of November, the reddish mist had become denser than it had yet been; the heat of the night was oppressive, although the thermometer was no higher than, 26°. The breeze which generally cools the air about eight or nine at night did not spring up. The atmosphere appeared on fire; and the barnt and dusty ground was cleft in all directions. On the 4th of November, about two in the afternoon, thick clouds of extraordinary blackness enveloped the lofty mountains of the Brigantine and the Tataraqual. They extended by degrees to the zenith. About four, we heard sharp and broken thunder over our heads, though at an immense height. At twelve minutes past four, the moment of the strongest electric explosion, there were two shocks of an earthquake; the second followed after an interval of fifteen seconds. The people ran shrieking into the streets. M. Bonpland, who was leaning over a table, examining some plants, was almost thrown down. I felt the second shock violently, though lying stretched in my hammock. What is rare at Cumana, its direction was from north to south. Some slaves, who were drawing water from a well more than twenty feet deep, close to the Rio Manzanarès, heard a report like the explosion of a strong charge of gunpowder. It seemed to come from the bottom of the well, a very singular phenomenon, though sufficiently known indeed in most of the countries of America that are subject to earthquakes.'---512, 513.

The first shock was preceded by a violent gust of wind; and followed by an electric shower of large drops of rain; a dead calm succeeded, which continued all night. The sun setting in the thick gloom, having its disc enormously enlarged, disfigured, and undulating, presented a spectacle of extraordinary magnificence. The shock of the earthquake, the clap of thunder which accompanied it, the red vapour seen for so many days, were all regarded as the effect of the eclipse. About nine a third shock was felt, less strong than the two former, but accompanied by a subterranean noise. A few months before this period, the city of Cumana had been almost totally destroyed by an earthquake; and

it was not therefore surprizing, that the people should have regarded these unusual phenomena as the prognostics of a similar misfortune.

On the morning of the 12th November, between two and three o'clock, there appeared in the east a number of luminous meteors of a very extraordinary kind. Thousands of fire-balls and falling stars succeeded each other for the space of four hours; their direction invariably being from north to south. There was not a space in the heavens equal in extent to three diameters of the moon, which was not observed at every moment filled with fire-balls and falling stars. All these meteors left luminous traces from 8° to 10° in length; and the phosphorescent light of these luminous belts continued from seven to eight seconds. Many of the falling stars had a nucleus very distinct, as large as the disc of Jupiter, from which proceeded sparks of an extremely vivid splendour; the balls appeared to burst as if by explosion, but the largest, from 1° to 1° 15' in diameter, disappeared without scintillation, and left behind them phosphorescent beams from fifteen to twenty minutes in breadth. The inhabitants of Cumana having risen before four o'clock to assist at the first mass, witnessed these phenomena with considerable alarm, the elder part recollecting that the dreadful earthquakes of 1766 had been preceded by similar appearances. They became more rare as the morning advanced, but a few were distinguishable by their white splendour and the rapidity of their motion, for a quarter of an hour after the sun had risen; this, however, our author considered as the less extraordinary, when he reflected, that in the year 1788, in the city of Papayan, the interior apartments of the houses were strongly illuminated in the middle of the day by an aerolite of an enormous size.

Our travellers afterwards found that these meteors had every where been observed and compared to artificial fire-works, even to the borders of Brazil, under the equinoxial line-but this distance was nothing when compared with that through which they had appeared, as they learnt on their arrival in Europe,—namely, over an extent of sixty-four degrees of latitude and ninety-one of longitude; on the equator, in America, to Labrador; and on the continent of Europe, at Weimar in Germany, and at Herrenhut in Greenland; the former of which is one thousand eight hundred, and the latter one thousand three hundred marine leagues from the Rio Negro, which, supposing the meteors to have been the same (and the time exactly corresponds) would prove their height above the earth's surface to be four hundred and eleven leagues. But we are strongly disposed to question their identity; to us it seems that their simultaneous appearance may be ascribed with far more probability to an identity of atmosphere than of bodies moving in that atmosphere, at such distances from the earth's surface; as, according to

the

the present state of our knowledge, it seems doubtful whether light or heat, or substance of any kind, could be sustained in a state so very much attenuated as it must necessarily be at such a height.

Those natural philosophers who have of late instituted such elaborate investigations into the nature of falling stars and their parallaxes, consider them as meteors belonging to the extreme limits of our atmosphere; as placed between the region of the aurora borealis and that of the lightest clouds. Some have been seen not higher than fourteen thousand toises, about four leagues; the most elevated appear not to exceed thirty. They are frequently more than a hundred feet in diameter; and such is their rapidity, that they traverse a space of two leagues in a few seconds. Some have been measured which had a direction almost perpendicular, or which formed an angle of fifty degrees with the vertical line. This very remarkable circumstance led to the conclusion, that falling stars are not aërolites, which, after floating a long while in space, like the heavenly bodies, take fire upon accidentally entering our atmosphere, and fall to the earth.'*p. 524.

From Cumana our travellers set out on a coasting voyage to the port of La Guayra. They descended rapidly the little river of Manzanares, the sinuosities of which are marked by cocoa-trees, as the windings of a river in our climate are by poplars and willows; the thorny bushes which by day presented only leaves covered with dust, glittered during the night with a thousand luminous and sparkling points. The number of phosphorescent insects (M. de Humboldt says) are greatly augmented in the hurricane months; when it is delightful to observe the effect of these moving and deepred fires, which, reflected by the pellucid water, confound their figures with those of the starry vault of heaven. The following observations are very characteristic of our author's manner.

'We left the shores of Cumana as if we had been old inhabitants. It was the first spot we had touched under a zone, on which my thoughts had been fixed from my earliest youth. Nature, under the climate of the Indies, gives birth to an impression so deep and powerful that, after a few months' stay, we seem to have lived there a long succession of years. In Europe, the inhabitant of the North, and of plains, experiences a similar sensation, when quitting, even after a transient visit, the shores of the gulf of Naples, the delightful country between Tivoli and the lake of Nemi, or the wild and awful scenery of the Upper Alps and the Pyrenees. Yet throughout the temperate zone, there is but little contrast in the vegetable world. The pines and oaks which top the mountains of Sweden have a certain family likeness to those which flourish under the genial climes of Greece and Italy. Between the tropics, on the contrary, in the lower regions of the two Indias, the whole face of nature is new and wonderful. In the plains, or in the gloom of the

* M. Chladni, who at first considered falling stars as aërolites, has since abandoned this notion.'

forests, the remembrance of Europe is almost effaced; for it is by vegetation that the character of scenery is determined; it is this which acts upon the imagination by its mass, by the contrast of its forms, and by the splendour of its colours. Our new impressions, in proportion to their strength and freshness, destroy those we have hitherto received. Their force gives them the semblance of age. I appeal to those who, more sensible to the beauties of nature than to the charms of social life, have spent much time in the torrid zone. With what fond remembrance do they cherish for the remainder of their days the spot where they first planted their foot! A vague desire of seeing it again lingers in their thoughts to the most advanced period of life. Even now, Cumana and ts dusty soil are oftener present to my imagination than all the wonders of the Cordilleras. Under the soft sky of the south, the earth, even where nearly destitute of vegetation, derives beauty from the light and enchanting hues of the atmosphere. The sun does not merely illumine every object, it colours, it throws around it an ethereal vapour which, without affecting the transparency of the air, renders the tints more harmonious, tempers the power of the light, and sheds throughout nature that calm which is reflected on our souls. To explain this vivid impression excited by the scenery of the two Indias, and this too upon coasts but thinly wooded, it may be sufficient to recall to mind, that the beauty of the sky from Naples to the equator augments almost as much as from Provence to the south of Italy.'-p. 531.

La Guayra, which is rather a roadsted than a harbour, is compared with Santa Cruz in Teneriffe; the houses of the city are backed by a wall of steep rocks, between which and the sea the level ground is not more than a hundred and forty toises in width: this space is occupied by two parallel streets, containing a population of about eight thousand inhabitants. The place has something of a lonely and melancholy appearance; bearing more affinity to that of a rocky island, destitute of soil and vegetation, than to a continent covered with vast forests. From a suite of experiments with the thermometer, it appeared that the climate of La Guayra is one of the highest temperatures on the globe: but it was not considered to be remarkably unhealthy; and that dreadful scourge, the yellow fever, had not been known there above two years before M. de Humboldt's visit; that is, immediately after opening the port to foreigners in 1797. The North Americans, labouring under typhus, were received into Spanish hospitals, and it was soon spread abroad that they had imported the contagious disease; while the North Americans declared, in their turn, that their people had brought it from La Guayra. Be this as it may, neither country has been free from it since the period in question, and perhaps both of them may with propriety refer its origin to the coast of Africa.

The road leading from La Guayra to the Caraccas is said to resemble those of Saint Gothard, and the Great St. Bernard; the culminating point of the mountain is named Las Vueltas; and a

sort