LIFE AND SCENERY IN VENEZUELA.
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.
[The illustrious traveller and scientist from whose picturesque descriptions of life and scenery in South America we here quote was born in Berlin, September 14, 1769. After a careful university education and scientific labors in Europe, he set sail for America in 1799, and during the succeeding five years explored a great extent of territory within the areas of the present states of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico. For twenty-five years succeeding his return he was employed in arranging his collections, publishing the results of his observations, and in other scientific labors. In 1829 he again became a traveller, and explored a wide district in Asia. He died, in his ninetieth year, May 6, 1859. Few men have ever done so much for the advancement of science, while his published works of travel contain much that is of value from a literary point of view. We extract a series of interesting passages relating to scenery and incidents in the Orinoco region. The first is descriptive of the remarkable “cow-tree.”]
When incisions are made in the trunk of this tree, it yields abundance of a glutinous milk, tolerably thick, devoid of all acridity, and of an agreeable and balmy smell. It was offered to us in the shell of a calabash. We drank considerable quantities of it in the evening before we went to bed, and very early in the morning, without feeling the least injurious effect. The glutinous character of this milk alone renders it a little disagreeable. The negroes and the free people who work in the plantations drink it, dipping into it their bread of maize or cassava. The overseer of the farm told us that the negroes grow sensibly fatter during the season when the palo de vaca furnishes them with most milk. The juice, exposed to the air, presents at its surface membranes of a strongly animalized substance, yellowish, stringy, and resembling cheese.
LA GUAYRA, VENEZUELA
Amidst the great number of curious phenomena which I have observed in the course of my travels, I confess there are few that have made so powerful an impression on me as the aspect of the cow-tree. Whatever relates to milk or to corn inspires an interest which is not merely that of the physical knowledge of things, but is connected with another order of ideas and sentiments. We can scarcely conceive how the human race could exist without farinaceous substances, and without that nourishing juice which the breast of the mother contains, and which is appropriated to the long feebleness of the infant. The amylaceous matter of corn, the object of religious veneration among so many nations, ancient and modern, is diffused in the seeds and deposited in the roots of vegetables; milk, which serves as an aliment, appears to us exclusively the produce of animal organization. Such are the impressions we have received in our earliest infancy; such is also the source of that astonishment created by the aspect of the tree just described. It is not here the solemn shades of forests, the majestic course of rivers, the mountains wrapped in eternal snow, that excite our emotion. A few drops of vegetable juice recall to our minds all the powerfulness and the fecundity of nature. On the barren flank of a rock grows a tree with coriaceous and dry leaves. Its large woody roots can scarcely penetrate into the stone. For several months of the year not a single shower moistens its foliage. Its branches appear dead and dried; but when the trunk is pierced there flows from it a sweet and nourishing milk. It is at the rising of the sun that this vegetable fountain is most abundant. The negroes and natives are then seen hastening from all quarters, furnished with large bowls to receive the milk, which grows yellow and thickens at its surface. Some empty their bowls under the tree itself, others carry the juice home to their children.
[The great plains of Venezuela are thus described:]