Aspects of nature, in different lands and different climates (Vol. 1 of 2) / with scientific elucidations

by Alexander von Humboldt

Compare Humboldt, Bonpland, and Kunth, Nova Genera Plant. æquinoct. T. i. p. 315.

[63] p. 229.—“The vault or cemetery of an extinct nation.”

During the period of my stay in the forests of the Orinoco, these caves of bones were examined by order of the Court. The Missionary of the Cataracts had been unjustly accused of having discovered in the caves treasures which had been hidden there by the Jesuits previous to their flight.

THE NOCTURNAL LIFE OF ANIMALS
IN THE
PRIMEVAL FOREST.

If the vivid appreciation and sentiment of nature which differ so greatly in nations of different descent, and if the natural character and aspect of the countries which those nations now inhabit, or which have been the scene of their earlier wanderings or abode, have rendered different languages more or less rich in well defined and characteristic expressions denoting the forms of mountains, the state of vegetation, the appearance of the atmosphere, and the contour and grouping of the clouds, it is also true that long use, and perhaps their arbitrary employment by literary men, have diverted many such words from their original meaning. Terms have been gradually regarded as synonymous which ought to have been preserved distinct; and thus languages have lost part of the vigour and the grace, as well as the fidelity, which they might otherwise have been capable of imparting to descriptions of natural scenery and of the characteristic physiognomy of a landscape. With the view of shewing how much an intimate acquaintance and contact with nature, and the wants and necessities of a laborious nomade life, may increase the riches of a language, I would recall the numerous characteristic appellations which may be used in Arabic[64] and in Persian to distinguish plains, steppes, and deserts, according as they are quite bare, covered with sand, broken by tabular masses of rock, or interspersed with patches of pasturage, or with long tracts occupied by social plants. Scarcely less striking is it to observe in the old Castilian idiom[65] the many expressions afforded for describing the physiognomy of mountain-masses, and more particularly for designating those features which, recurring in every zone of the earth’s surface, announce from afar to the attentive beholder the nature of the rock. As the declivities of the Andes, of Peru, Chili, and Mexico, and the mountainous parts of the Canaries, the Antilles and the Philippines, are all inhabited by men of Spanish descent, and as these are the parts of the earth where, (with the exception, perhaps, of the Himalaya and the Thibetian Highlands), the manner of life of the inhabitants is most affected by and dependent on the form of the earth’s surface, so all the expressions which the language of the mother country afforded for denoting the forms of mountains in trachytic, basaltic, and porphyritic districts, as well as in those where schists, limestones, and sandstone are the prevailing rocks, have been happily preserved in daily use. Under such influences even newly formed words become part of the common treasure. Speech is enriched and animated by everything that tends to and promotes truth to nature, whether in rendering the impressions received through the senses from the contemplation of the external world, or in expressing thoughts, emotions, or sentiments which have their sources in the inner depths of our being.

In descriptions of natural objects or scenery, both in the manner of viewing the phenomena, and in the choice of the expressions employed to describe them, this truth to nature must ever be kept in view as the guiding aim: its attainment will be at once most easily and most effectually secured by simplicity in the narration of what we have ourselves beheld or experienced, and by limiting and individualising the locality with which the narrative is connected. Generalisation of physical views, and the statement of general results, belong rather to the “study of the Cosmos,” which, indeed, must ever continue to be to us a science of Induction; but the animated description of organic forms (plants and animals) in their local and picturesque relations to the varied surface of the earth (as a small fragment of the whole terrestrial life) affords materials towards the study of the Cosmos, and also tends to advance it by the stimulus or impulse imparted to the mind when artistic treatment is applied to phenomena of nature on a great scale.

Among such phenomena must certainly be classed the vast forest region which, in the tropical portion of South America, fills the great connected basins of the Orinoco and the Amazons. If the name of primeval forest, or “Urwald,” which has of late years been so prodigally bestowed, is to be given to any forests on the face of the earth, none can claim it perhaps so strictly as the region of which we are speaking. The term “Urwald,” primitive or primeval forest, as well as Urseit and Urvolk,—primitive age, primitive nation,—are words of rather indefinite meaning, and, for the most part, only relative import. If this name is to be given to every wild forest full of a thick growth of trees on which Man has never laid a destroying hand, then the phenomenon is one which belongs to many parts of the temperate and cold zones. But if the character of the “Urwald” is that of a forest so truly impenetrable, that it is impossible to clear with an axe any passage between trees of eight or twelve feet diameter for more than a few paces, then such forests belong exclusively to the tropical regions. Nor is it by any means, as is often supposed in Europe, only the interlacing “lianes” or climbers which make it impossible to penetrate the forest; the “lianes” often form only a very small portion of the underwood. The chief obstacle is presented by an undergrowth of plants filling up every interval in a zone where all vegetation has a tendency to become ligneous. An impatient desire for the fulfilment of a long cherished wish may sometimes have led travellers who have only just landed in a tropical country, or perhaps island, to imagine that although still in the immediate vicinity of the sea-shore they had entered the precincts of a primeval forest, or “Urwald,” such as I have described as impenetrable. In this they deceived themselves; it is not every tropical forest which is entitled to an appellation which I have scarcely ever used in the narrative of my travels; although I believe that of all investigators of nature now living, Bonpland, Martius, Poppig, Robert and Richard Schomburgk, and myself, are those who have spent the longest period of time in primeval forests in the interior of a great continent.

Rich as is the Spanish language, (as I have already remarked), in appellations of distinct and definite meaning in the description of nature, yet the same word “Monte” is employed for mountain and forest, for cerro, (montaña) and for selva. In an inquiry into the true breadth and greatest easterly extension of the chain of the Andes, I have shewed how this two-fold signification of the word “monte” led to the introduction, in a fine and extensively circulated English map of South America, of high mountain ranges, where, in reality, only plains exist. When the Spanish map of La Cruz Olmedilla, which has served as the foundation of so many other maps, shewed “Montes de Cacao,”[66] “cacao woods,” Cordilleras were made to rise although the cacao seeks only the lowest and hottest localities.

If we comprehend in one general view the wooded region which includes the whole of the interior of South America, from the grassy steppes of Venezuela (los Llanos de Caracas) to the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, or from 8° North to 19° South latitude, we shall perceive that this connected forest of the tropical zone has an extent unequalled in any other portion of the earth’s surface. Its area is about twelve times that of Germany. Traversed in all directions by systems of rivers, in which the minor and tributary streams sometimes exceed our Rhine or our Danube in the abundance of their waters, it owes the wonderful luxuriance of the growth of its trees to the combined influence of great moisture and high temperature. In the temperate zone, and especially in Europe and Northern Asia, forests may be named from particular genera or species, which, growing together as social plants, (plantæ sociales) form separate and distinct woods. In the northern forests of Oaks, Pines, and Birches, and in the eastern forests of Limes or Linden trees, usually only one species of Amentaceæ, Coniferæ, or Tiliaceæ, prevails or is predominant; sometimes a single species of Needle-trees is intermingled with the foliage of trees of other classes. Tropical forests, on the other hand, decked with thousands of flowers, are strangers to such uniformity of association; the exceeding variety of their flora renders it vain to ask of what trees the primeval forest consists. A countless number of families are here crowded together, and even in small spaces individuals of the same species are rarely associated. Each day, and at each change of place, new forms present themselves to the traveller, who, however, often finds that he cannot reach the blossoms of trees whose leaves and ramifications had previously arrested his attention.

The rivers, with their countless lateral arms, afford the only routes by which the country can be traversed. Between the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, astronomical observations, and where these were wanting, determinations by compass of the direction of the rivers, respectively shewed us that two lonely mission villages might be only a few miles apart, and yet that the monks when they wished to visit each other could only do so by spending a day and a half in following the windings of small streams, in canoes hollowed out of the trunks of trees. A striking evidence of the impenetrability of particular parts of the forest is afforded by a trait related by an Indian of the habits of the large American tiger, or panther-like jaguar. While in the Llanos of Varinas and the Meta, and in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, the introduction of European cattle, horses, and mules has enabled the beasts of prey to find an abundant subsistence,—so that since the first discovery of America their numbers have increased exceedingly in those extended and treeless grassy steppes,—their congeners in the dense forests around the sources of the Orinoco lead a very different and far less easy life. In a bivouac near the junction of the Cassiquiare with the Orinoco we had had the misfortune of losing a large dog, to which we were much attached, as the most faithful and affectionate companion of our wanderings. Being still uncertain whether he had been actually killed by the tigers, a faint hope of recovering him induced us, in returning from the mission of Esmeralda through the swarms of musquitoes by which it is infested, to spend another night at the spot where we had so long sought him in vain. We heard the cries of the jaguar, probably the very individual which we suspected of the deed, extremely near to us; and as the clouded sky made astronomical observations impossible, we passed part of the night in making our interpreter (lenguaraz) repeat to us the accounts given by our native boat’s crew of the tigers of the country.