35,200 geographical square miles. The dwellers on the banks of the Apure, near the junction of the river Nula, and the inhabitants of the most distant part of the seacoast of Venezuela, alike compared the sound to that of the discharge of great pieces of ordnance. Now, from the confluence of the Nula with the Apure to the volcano of St. Vincent is a distance in a straight line of 628 English geographical square miles. The sound, which certainly was not propagated through the air, must have proceeded from a deep-seated subterranean cause, for its intensity was scarcely greater on the seacoast nearest to the volcano where the eruption was taking place than in the interior of the country, in the basin of the Apure and the Orinoko."

The well-known fact that at the time of the great earthquake of November 1st, 1755, at Lisbon, the sea in the north of Europe rose suddenly many feet above its ordinary level on the Swedish coast, and that the Swiss cities were violently agitated as if by a storm, may be cited in support of the theory of the widespread action of subterranean volcanic forces. Even among the Eastern islands of the West India group, such as Martinique, Antigua, and Barbadoes, where the tide - never exceeds thirty inches, the sea suddenly rose more than twenty feet.

"All these phenomena," says the great philosopher, "show the operation of subterranean forces, acting either dynamically in earthquakes, in the tension and agitation of the crust, or in volcanoes, in the production and the chemical alteration of substances. They also show that these forces do not act superficially in the thin outermost crust of the globe, but from great depths in the interior of our planet, through crevices or unfilled veins, affecting at one and the same time points of the earth's surface at a great distance from each other."

IV.

Treatment of Slaves-The Marshes of Araya-Salt Works-A Castilian Shoemaker-Cheap Immortality-Manners and Customs of the Natives of Araya -Effect of the Dominion of the Priests-The Capuchins of Caripe-Cavern of the Guacharo-Nocturnal Birds-Singular Method of Procuring OilAbundant and Varied Flora of Caripe-The Vultures of Cumana-Their Lazy Habits.

BY

Y astronomical measurement Humboldt ascertained the real longitude and latitude of Cumana, and of many other places, which had been erroneously stated in the maps. The greater part of his time at Cumana was occupied in astronomical labours which furnished data for his subsequent works. The travellers were struck by the wretched condition of the slaves, and wondered at the indifference with which cruelties were inflicted upon these unfortunate people, who were not more considered or protected than if they had been so many head of cattle. The practice of branding them with a hot iron on the arms or the forehead that they might be known in case of an attempted escape was universal; and they were sold in open market without any restriction, the age of the slave being ascertained, like that of a horse, by forcing open his mouth and examining his teeth. In reference to the slaves and their condition, Humboldt quotes the noble passage of La Bruyère:- -"We find (under the torrid zone) certain wild animals, male and female, scattered through the country, black, livid, and scorched all over by the sun, bent to the earth, which they dig and turn up with indefatigable perseverance. They have something like an articulate voice, and when they stand up on their feet they exhibit a human face, and, in fact, these creatures are men."

The great salt marshes of Araya, worked by the Spanish government and a source of considerable profit, constitute one of the sights in the neighbourhood of Cumana. A calculation of the amount of salt consumed by the inhabitants of the two provinces of Cumana and Barcelona in 1799 and 1800 gave the astonishing quantity of sixty pounds for each person, while in France, where a few years previously a similar calculation had been made to assess the value of the gabelle, or salt-tax, only twelve to fourteen pounds were reckoned by M. Necker, the minister of finance, as consumed by each individual. The difference is partly attributed to the quantity of salt employed in curing meat.

Y

The inhabitants of the peninsula of Araya were a harmless set of black men, living chiefly on the fish they caught, and as shiftless and idle as negroes almost invariably are. When their visitors expressed surprise that they did not cultivate gardens, in which with little trouble they might raise abundance of vegetables and fruit, they replied that their gardens were beyond the gulf, meaning that they could bring back vegetables and fruit from Cumana, whither they carried their fish for sale. They had a very fine breed of goats, which roamed in wild freedom among the mountains, each, however, bearing the mark of its owner. It is recorded as a trait of unusual generosity among these people that when a hunter kills a goat bearing one of these marks, he immediately carries it to the family whose property the mark indicates it to be, and any wrongful appropriation of a goat is extremely rare.

"Dans le pays des aveugles les borgnes sont rois," says the old French proverb. An illustration of this truth was found at Araya, where the travellers encountered one of these one-eyed kings of the blind. The following account is given of him: "Among the mulattoes, whose huts surround the salt lake, we found a shoemaker of Castilian descent. He received us with the air of gravity and self-sufficiency which in those climes characterises almost all who are conscious of possessing some peculiar talent. He was employed in stretching the string of his bow, and sharpening his arrows to kill birds. His trade of a shoemaker could not be very lucrative in a country where the majority of the inhabitants go barefoot; but he only complained that, on account of the dearness of European gunpowder, a man of his quality was reduced to employ the weapons used by the Indians. He was the wise man of the plain; he knew how the salt was formed by the influence of the sun and the full moon, could tell the symptoms of earthquakes, distinguish the marks by which mines of gold and silver are discovered, and select medicinal plants, which, like all other colonists from Chili to California, he divided into two classes, hot and cold (exciting and debilitating). Having collected the traditions of the country, he gave us some curious accounts of the pearls of Cubagna, articles of luxury for which he expressed the profoundest contempt. To show us how familiar the sacred writings were to him, he took a pride in quoting to us the patriarch Job, who preferred wisdom to all the pearls of the Indies. His philosophy was circumscribed by the narrow range of his daily wants. A very strong ass, which should be able to carry a heavy load of vegetables to the embarcadere, was the

only possession he coveted." This sage with a great flourish presented a few very small and opaque pearls to his visitors, but the philosophic contemner of this world's goods had sufficient vanity to beg that the travellers would note in their tablets for future publication the fact that a poor shoemaker of Araya, but a white man, and of noble Castilian race, had been able to give away what on the other side of the great sea (a figurative expression among the colonists for Europe) was sought for as a very precious thing. Humboldt promised to make a note of it, and was as good as his word; and thus the philosophic cobbler of Cumana purchased immortality at the price of a few pearls, "small in size and opaque in colour." A shrewd sage, with no small share of the wisdom of the serpent in his composition.

The narrative mentions that in crossing the barren hills of Cape Cirial, the strong smell of petroleum was perceived by the travellers. The first historians of these regions, including Oviedo, had mentioned the petroleum springs as fountains of "a resinous, aromatic, and medicinal liquor," but neither they nor the later explorers had any idea what an important part petroleum was destined in future days to play in commerce. A great marvel was shown to the travellers in the shape of the eye-stone, or piedra de las oyos. This production was described by the colonists as one of the marvels of nature, being at once a stone or an animal. Motionless when found in the sand, they declared that when placed on a polished surface, such as a metal or earthenware plate, and excited by lemon-juice, it showed signs of life and moved. Placed in the eye, it turned about and expelled any foreign [substance that might accidentally or otherwise be there. At the salt-works and at the village of Maniquarez, where a great many of these eye-stones were offered to the strangers, the natives were especially anxious to show their visitors the efficacy of this wonderful substance, and obligingly offered to put sand in the travellers' eyes, and afterwards show them how easily the eye-stone would expel every particle. A very simple explanation of the marvel is offered by our author. The wonderful stones are nothing more than little convex slabs of a small univalve shell of a chalky nature. When brought into contact with an acid, this chalk or lime effervesces and moves by the action which disengages the carbonic acid. Introduced into the eye, especially with the addition of lemon-juice, the stones naturally increase the flow of tears, and thus every foreign substance is expelled. The inhabitants of Araya, however, utterly refused to believe in the

correctness of this explanation, and greatly preferred believing in the supernatural virtues of their eye-stone.

A journey to the interior, to the missions of the Chayma Indians and the mountains of New Andalusia, opened new and wondrous scenes. It was the 4th of September when they set out. The morning was deliciously cool, and the road along the bank of the Manzanares, the river which flows through Cumana, was fragrant with rich vegetation, and presently led through forests of palm-trees and arborescent ferns. The great traveller discusses in a liberal and kindly spirit the nature and effect of the Roman Catholic missions established among the Indians. While fully recognising the benefits of the security afforded to the Indians, and the mildness of the rule established over them, he is far too clear-sighted and too honest to overlook the weak points of the system. The Indians appear, like the Tahitians and other nations among whom missions have been established, to have been denationalised and reduced to a state of helpless dependence, which has rendered them utterly childish. On some swarthy countenances, indeed, the travellers read a lurking expression of defiance which seemed to indicate that the control in which the Indians were kept was anything but welcome; but in general the people appeared thoroughly helpless, pliant, and submissive, anxious to please those in authority over them, with no intellect or judgment of their own, and ready to acquiesce in any proposition or assertion advanced by a white man. Thus the author especially warns those travellers who may come after him to be cautious of valuing “information" received from Indians at more than its worth, for they will frequently fill in details and narrate stories that have no foundation in truth, merely to please their audience. The system of the missions also kept them isolated and apart from each other, so that there was little chance of their development, either intellectually or nationally.

In descending the mountains, occasions frequently occurred to show the admirable sure-footedness of the mules used among the passes. "We found this passage difficult," says Humboldt, "because at that time we had not climbed the Cordilleras; but it is by no means so perilous as they are fond of representing it at Cumana. The path is indeed in several places only fourteen or fifteen inches broad, and the ridge of the mountain, along which the road runs, is covered with a short and exceedingly slippery turf; the slopes on each side are steep, and the traveller, if he should stumble, might slide down on the grass