ILLUSTRATIONS AND ADDITIONS.

Footnote 71:

p. 210—“_On the Chimborazo, upwards of eight thousand feet higher than

Etna_.”

Small singing birds, and even butterflies, (as I have myself witnessed

in the Pacific,) are often met with at great distances from the shore,

during storms blowing off land. In a similar manner insects are

involuntarily carried into the higher regions of the atmosphere, to an

elevation of 17,000 to 19,000 feet above the plains. The light bodies

of these insects are borne upwards by the vertically ascending

currents of air caused by the heated condition of the earth’s surface.

M. Boussingault, an admirable chemist, who ascended the Gneiss

Mountains of Caracas, while holding the appointment of Professor in

the newly established Mining Academy at Santa Fé de Bogotá, witnessed,

during his ascent to the summit of the Silla, a phenomenon which

confirmed in a most remarkable manner this vertical ascent of air. He

and his companion, Don Mariano de Rivero, observed at noon a number of

luminous whitish bodies rise from the valley of Caracas to the summit

of the Silla, an elevation of 5755 feet, and then sink towards the

adjacent sea coast. This phenomenon was uninterruptedly prolonged for

a whole hour, when it was discovered that the bodies, at first

mistaken for a flock of small birds, were a number of minute balls of

grass-haums. Boussingault sent me some of this grass, which was

immediately recognised by Professor Kunth as a species of Vilfa, a

genus of grass which together with Agrostis is of frequent occurrence

in the provinces of Caracas and Cumana. It was the _Vilfa tenacissima_

of our _Synopsis Plantarum æquinoctialium Orbis Novi_, t. i. p. 205.

Saussure found butterflies on Mont Blanc, and Ramond observed them in

the solitudes around the summit of Mont Perdu. When MM. Bonpland,

Carlos Montufar, and myself, on the 23rd of June, 1802, ascended the

eastern declivity of Mount Chimborazo, to a height of 19,286 feet, and

where the barometer had fallen to 14·84 inches, we found winged

insects buzzing around us. We recognised them to be Diptera,

resembling flies, but it was impossible to catch these insects

standing on the rocky ledges (_cuchilla_), often less than a foot in

breadth, and between masses of snow precipitated from above. The

elevation at which we observed these insects was almost the same as

that in which the naked trachytic rock, which projected from the

eternal snows around, exhibited the last traces of vegetation in

Lecidea geographica. These insects were flying at an elevation of

18,225 feet, or nearly 2660 feet higher than the summit of Mont Blanc:

and somewhat below this height, at an elevation of 16,626 feet, and

therefore also above the region of snow, M. Bonpland saw yellow

butterflies flying close to the ground. The mammalia which live

nearest to the region of perpetual snow, are, in the Swiss Alps, the

hybernating marmot, and a very small field-mouse, (Hypudæus nivalis,)

described by Martius, which on the Faulhorn lays up, almost under the

snow, a store of the roots of phanerogamic alpine plants.[JC] The

opinion prevalent in Europe, that the beautiful rodent, the

Chinchilla, whose soft and glossy fur is so much esteemed, is found in

the highest mountain regions of Chili, is an error. The Chinchilla

laniger (Gray) lives only in a mild lower zone, and does not advance

further south than the parallel of 35°.[JD]

Whilst among our European Alps, Lecideas, Parmelias, and Umbilicarias

but scantily clothe with a few coloured patches those rocks that are

not wholly covered with snow, we found in the Andes, at elevations of

13,700 to nearly 15,000 feet, some phanerogamic plants which we were

the first to describe; as for instance, the woolly species of

Fraylejon. (Culcitium nivale, C. rufescens, and C. reflexum, Espeletia

grandiflora, and E. argentea), Sida pichinchensis, Ranunculus

nubigenus, R. Gusmanni with red or orange-coloured flowers, the small

moss-like umbelliferous plant, Myrrhis andicola, and Fragosa

arctioides. On the declivity of the Chimborazo, the Saxifraga

Boussingaulti, described by Adolph Brongniart, grows beyond the limits

of perpetual snow on loose blocks of stone at an elevation of 15,770

feet above the level of the sea, and not at 17,000 as has been stated

in two admirable English journals.[JE] This Saxifrage, discovered by

Boussingault, must therefore be regarded as the highest growing

phanerogamic plant in the world.

The vertical height of Chimborazo is, according to my measurement,

21,422 feet.[JF] This result is a mean between those which have been

given by the French and Spanish Academicians. The principal

differences do not here depend on different assumptions for the

refraction, but on a difference in reducing the measured line to the

level of the sea. This reduction can only be made in the Andes by the

barometer, and hence every so-called trigonometric measurement must

also necessarily be a barometric one, whose result will vary according

to the different formulæ employed. Owing to the enormous mass of the

mountain chain, we can only obtain very small angles of altitude, when

the greater portion of the whole height has to be measured

trigonometrically, and the observation is made at some low and distant

point near the plain or the level of the sea. It is on the other hand

extremely difficult to obtain a convenient base line, as the space

that is to be determined barometrically increases with every step we

advance towards the mountain. These obstacles have to be encountered

by every traveller who on the high table-lands, which surround the

summit of the Andes, selects a spot for performing a geodetic

operation. On the pumice-covered plain of Tapia, to the west of the

Rio Chambo, at a height of 9477 feet, barometrically determined, I

measured the Chimborazo. The Llanos de Luisa, and more especially the

plain of Sisgun, whose elevation is 12,150 feet, would yield greater

angles of altitude. I had on one occasion made every preparation

necessary for the measurement of Mount Chimborazo, from the plain of

Sisgun, when the summit of the mountain was suddenly shrouded in a

dense cloud.

Some hypothetical suggestions, regarding the probable derivation of

the name of the far-famed “Chimborazo,” may not be wholly unwelcome to

etymologists. The district in which the mountain is situated is called

Chimbo, a word which La Condamine[JG] derives from _chimpani_, to

cross a river. “Chimboraço” means, according to him, “the snow of the

opposite bank,” from the fact of a brook being crossed at the village

of Chimbo, in sight of the huge snow-covered mountain. (In the Quichua

language _chimpa_ signifies the opposite bank or side; _chimpani_ to

cross a river, bridge, &c.) Several natives of the province of Quito

assured me that Chimborazo meant simply the snow of Chimbo. In

Carguairazo we meet with the same termination, and it would appear

that “razo” is a provincial word. The Jesuit Holguin, whose excellent

vocabulary[JH] I possess, is not acquainted with the word razo. The

genuine term for snow is ritti. On the other hand, my friend,

Professor Buschmann, an admirable linguist, remarks that in the

Chinchaysuyo dialect, (employed north of Cuzco as far as Quito and

Pasto) raju, the _j_ being apparently guttural, signifies snow.[JI] As

chimpa and chimpani do not well suit on account of the _a_, we may

seek a definite meaning for the first portion of the name of the

mountain and of the village Chimbo, in the Quichua word “chimpu,”

which is used to express a coloured thread or fringe (señal de lana,

hilo ó borlilla de colores); the redness of the sky (arreboles), and

the halo round the sun and moon. The name of the mountain might be

thus derived from this word, without reference to the district or

village. At all events, whatever may be the etymology of the word

Chimborazo, it should be written in the Peruvian manner Chimporazo, as

the Peruvians have no _b_ in their alphabet.

May not the name of this colossal mountain be wholly independent of

the Inca language, and have come down from a bygone age? The Inca or

Quichua language had not been introduced long prior to the Spanish

invasion into the kingdom of Quito, where the now wholly extinct

Puruay language had been previously used. The names of other

mountains, as Pichincha, Ilinissa, and Cotopaxi, are wholly devoid of

meaning in the language of the Incas, and are therefore undoubtedly of

higher antiquity than the introduction of the worship of the sun, and

of the court-language of the rulers of Cuzco. The names of mountains

and rivers belong in all regions of the earth to the most ancient and

authentic relics of languages; and my brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt,

in his investigations into the former distribution of the Iberian

races, has made ingenious use of these names. A singular and

unexpected statement has recently been made,[JJ] “that the Incas,

Tupac Yupanqui, and Huayna Capac, were astonished on their first

conquest of Quito, to find a dialect of their Quichua language in use

among the natives.” Prescott, however, seems to regard this as a very

bold assertion.[JK]

If we could suppose the pass of St. Gothard, Mount Athos, or the Rigi,

piled on the summit of the Chimborazo, we should have the elevation

which is at present ascribed to the Dhawalagiri in the Himalaya. The

geologist who regards the interior of our planet from a more general

point of view, and to whom not the directions, but the relative

heights of the rocky projections, which we designate mountain chains,

appear but as phenomena of little importance, will not be astonished

if at some future period mountain summits should be discovered between

the Himalaya and the Altai, which should surpass in height those of

Dhawalagiri and Djawahir as much as these exceed that of

Chimborazo.[JL] The great height to which the snow-line recedes _in

summer_ on the northern declivity of the Himalaya, owing to the heat

radiated from the elevated plateaux in Central Asia, renders the

mountain, notwithstanding that it is situated in 29 to 30½° north

lat., as accessible as are the Peruvian Andes in the region of the

tropics. Captain Gerard has moreover recently ascended the Tarhigang

as high, if not 117 feet higher,[JM] than I ascended the Chimborazo.

Unfortunately, as I have elsewhere more fully shown, these mountain

ascents, beyond the line of perpetual snow, however they may engage

the curiosity of the public, are of very little scientific utility.

Footnote 72:

p. 210—“_The Condor, that giant among vultures_.”

I have elsewhere[JN] given the natural history of the Condor, which

before my travels had been variously misstated. The name is properly

_Cuntur_ in the Inca language; _Mañque_ among the Araucanes in Chili;

_Sarcoramphus Condor_ according to Duméril. I sketched the head of

this bird from life, of the natural size, and had my drawing engraved.

Next to the Condor, the Lämmergeier of Switzerland, and the _Falco

destructor_ (Daud.), probably Linnæus’ _Falco Harpyia_, are the

largest of all _flying_ birds.

The region which may be regarded as the common resort of the Condor,

begins at the elevation of Mount Etna. It embraces atmospheric strata

which are from 10,000 to 19,000 feet above the level of the sea.

Humming birds also, which in their summer flights advance as far as

61° north lat. on the western coast of America, and are on the other

hand found in the Archipelago of the Tierra del Fuego, were seen by

Von Tschudi in Puna at an elevation of 14,600 feet.[JO] There is a

pleasure in comparing the largest and the smallest of the feathered

inhabitants of the air. The largest among the Condors found in the

Cordilleras, near Quito, measure nearly 15 feet across the expanded

wings, and the smaller ones 8½ feet. This size, and the visual angle

at which the birds are seen vertically above one’s head, afford an

idea of the enormous height to which the Condor soars in a clear sky.

A visual angle of four minutes, for instance, would give a vertical

elevation of 7330 feet. The cavern (Mackay) of Antisana, opposite the

mountain of Chussulongo, and where we measured the birds soaring over

the chain of the Andes, lies at an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet

above the surface of the Pacific; the absolute height which the Condor

reached must therefore be 23,273 feet, a height at which the barometer

scarcely stands at 12·7 inches; but which, however, does not exceed

that of the loftiest summit of the Himalaya. It is a remarkable

physiological phenomenon that the same bird, which wheels for hours

together through these highly rarefied regions, should be able

suddenly, as for instance on the western declivity of the volcano of

Pichincha, to descend to the sea-shore, and thus in the course of a

few hours traverse, as it were, all climates. At heights of 23,000

feet and upwards the membranous air-sacs of the Condor must undergo a

remarkable degree of inflation after being filled in lower regions of

the atmosphere.

Ulloa, more than a hundred years ago, expressed his astonishment that

the Vulture of the Andes could soar at heights where the pressure of

the atmosphere was less than fifteen inches.[JP] An opinion was at

that time entertained, from the analogy of experiments made with the

air-pump, that no animal could exist under this slight amount of

atmospheric pressure. I have myself, as has already been mentioned,

seen the barometer fall to 14·85 inches on the Chimborazo; and my

friend, M. Gay-Lussac, breathed for a quarter of an hour an atmosphere

in which the pressure was only 12·9 inches. It must be admitted that

man, when wearied by muscular exertion, finds himself in a state of

painful exhaustion at such elevations; but in the Condor, the

respiratory process seems to be performed with equal facility under a

pressure of 30 or of 13 inches. This bird probably raises itself

_voluntarily_ to a greater height from the surface of our earth than

any other living creature. I use the expression “voluntarily,” since

small insects and siliceous-shelled infusoria are frequently borne to

greater elevations by a rising current of air. It is probable that the

Condor flies even higher than the above calculations would appear to

show. I remember observing near the Cotopaxi, in the pumice plain of

Suniguaicu, at an elevation of 14,471 feet above the level of the sea,

this bird soaring at such a height above my head that it appeared like

a black speck. But what is the smallest angle under which faintly

illumined objects can be distinguished? Their form (linear extension)

exercises a great influence on the minimum of this angle. The

transparency of the mountain air is so great under the equator, that

in the province of Quito, as I have elsewhere stated, the white cloak

(_poncho_) of a horseman may be distinguished with the naked eye at a

horizontal distance of 89,664 feet, and therefore under an angle of

thirteen seconds. It was my friend Bonpland whom we observed, from the

pleasant country-seat of the Marques de Selvalegre, moving along a

black rocky precipice on the volcano of Pichincha. Lightning

conductors, being thin elongated objects, are visible, as Arago has

observed, from the greatest distances and under the smallest angles.

The account I have given in my Monograph of the Condor (_Zoologie_,

pp. 26–45) of the habits of this powerful bird in the mountain

districts of Quito and Peru has been confirmed by a more recent

traveller, Gay, who has explored the whole of Chili, and described it

in his admirable work, _Historia fisica y politica de Chile_. This

bird which, singularly enough, like the Lamas, Vicuñas, Alpacas and

Guanacos, is not found beyond the equator in New Granada, penetrates

as far south as the Straits of Magellan. In Chili, as in the elevated

plateaux of Quito, the Condors, which usually live in pairs, or even

alone, congregate in flocks for the purpose of attacking lambs and

calves, or seizing on young Guanacos (Guanacillos). The havoc annually

committed by the Condor among the herds of sheep, goats and cattle, as

well as among the wild vicuñas, alpacas and guanacos of the chain of

the Andes is very considerable. The Chilians assert that this bird

when in captivity can endure hunger for forty days; when in a free

state, however, its voracity is excessive, and it then, like the

vulture, feeds by preference on carrion.

The mode of catching these birds, by an inclosure of palisades such as

I have already described, is as successful in Chili as in Peru, for

the bird after being rendered heavy from excess of food is obliged to

run a short distance with half-extended wings before it can take

flight. A dead ox which is already in an incipient state of

decomposition, is strongly inclosed with palisades, within which

narrow space the Condors throng together; being unable, as already

observed, to fly on account of the excess of food which they have

devoured, and impeded in their run by the palisades, these birds are

either killed by the natives with clubs, or are caught alive by the

lasso. The Condor was represented as a symbol of strength on the

coinage of Chili immediately after the first declaration of political

independence.[JQ]

The different species of Gallinazos, which are much more considerable

in point of numbers than the Condors, are also far more useful than

the latter in the great economy of Nature for destroying and removing

animal substances that are becoming decomposed, and thus purifying the

atmosphere in the neighbourhood of human dwellings. In tropical

America, I have sometimes seen seventy or eighty of these creatures

collected round a dead ox; and I am able, as an eye-witness, to

confirm the fact that has of late erroneously been called in question

by ornithologists, that the appearance of one single king-vulture (who

is not larger than the Gallinazos) is sufficient to put a whole

assemblage of these birds to flight. No contest ever takes place; but

the Gallinazos (two species of which, (Cathartes urubu and C. aura,)

have been confounded together by an unfortunately fluctuating

nomenclature) are intimidated by the sudden appearance and the

courageous demeanour of the richly coloured “_Sarcoramphus Papa_.” As

the ancient Egyptians protected the Percnopteri, which purified the

atmosphere, so also the wanton destruction of Gallinazos is punished

in Peru by a fine (_multa_) which, according to Gay, amounts in some

cities to 300 piastres for every bird. It is a remarkable fact, that

this species of vulture, as was already testified by Don Felix de

Azara, if trained early, will so accustom themselves to the person who

has reared them, that they will follow him on a journey for many

miles, flying after his carriage across the Pampa.

Footnote 73:

p. 211—“_Encloses their rotating bodies_.”

Fontana, in his admirable treatise “on the poison of the viper,” vol.

i. p. 62, mentions that he succeeded in restoring to animation, after

two hours’ immersion in a drop of water, a wheel-animalcule which had

lain in a dried and motionless condition for the space of two years

and a half.[JR]

The so-called reanimation of Rotifera has very recently again been

made a subject of lively discussion, since observations have been

conducted with more exactness and subjected to a stricter criticism.

Baker affirmed that in 1771, he had revived paste-eels which Needham

had given him in the year 1744! Franz Bauer saw his _Vibrio tritici_,

which had lain four years in a dry state, move on being moistened. The

remarkably careful and experienced observer, Doyère,[JS] draws the

following conclusions from his beautiful experiments: that Rotifera

revive, i.e. pass from a motionless state to one of motion, after

being exposed to a cold of 11°.2 Fahr., or to a heat of 113° Fahr.;

that they preserve the property of reviving in dry sand up to a

temperature of 159° Fahr.; but that they lose this property and remain

immoveable if warmed in _moist sand_ to 131° Fahr. only;[JT] and that

the possibility of this so-called revivification is not prevented by

their being exposed to desiccation for twenty-eight days in barometric

tubes, in vacuo, even should chloride of lime or sulphuric acid be

employed.[JU]

Doyère has also seen Rotifera slowly revive after being dried without

sand, (desséchés à nu,) a fact which Spallanzani denies.[JV]

“Desiccation conducted in an ordinary temperature might be open to

many objections which are not perhaps wholly obviated by the

employment of a dry vacuum; but when we observe that the _Tardigrades_

irrevocably perish in a temperature of 131° Fahr. if their tissues are

permeated with water, whereas they can, when dried, support a

temperature that may be estimated at 248° Fahr., we are disposed to

admit that the sole condition required for _animal_ revivification is

the perfect integrity of organic structure and continuity.”

In like manner, the sporules, or germinating cells of cryptogamic

plants, which Kunth compares to the propagation of certain

phanerogamic plants by buds (bulbillæ), retain their power of

germination in the highest temperature. According to the most recent

experiments of Payen, the sporules of a small fungus (Oïdium

aurantiacum), which invests the crumb of bread with a reddish feathery

coating, do not even lose their vegetative powers by being exposed in

closed tubes for half an hour to a temperature of 183° to 208° Fahr.

before being strewn on fresh, unspoilt dough. May not the newly

discovered and wonderful monad (Monas prodigiosa), which causes

blood-like spots in mealy substances, have been mixed with this

fungus?

Ehrenberg, in his great work on Infusoria (p. 492–496), has given the

most complete history of all the observations instituted on the

so-called revivification of Rotifera. He believes, that

notwithstanding all the means of desiccation employed, the

organization-fluid still remains in the apparently dead animal. He

contests the hypothesis of “latent life”; for death, he says, “is not

life in a torpid state, but the absence of life.”

The hybernation or winter-sleep of both warm and coldblooded animals,

as dormice, marmots, sand-martins (_Hirundo riparia_, according to

Cuvier)[JW], and of frogs and toads, affords us evidence of the

diminution, if not of the complete suspension, of the organic

functions. Frogs awakened from their winter-sleep by warmth, can

remain eight times longer under water, without drowning, than frogs in

the breeding season. It seems as if the respiratory functions of the

lungs require a less degree of activity after the long suspension of

their excitability. The circumstance of the sand-martin burying itself

during the winter in marshes, is a phenomenon which, while it scarcely

admits of a doubt, is the more remarkable, because in birds, the

function of respiration is so extremely energetic, that, according to

Lavoisier’s experiments, two sparrows in an ordinary condition will,

in the same time, decompose as much atmospheric air as a

Guinea-pig.[JX] Winter-sleep is not supposed to be general to the

whole species of these sand-martins, but only to some few

individuals.[JY]

As in the frigid zone deprivation of warmth produces winter-sleep in

some animals, so in the torrid regions, within the tropics, an

analogous phenomenon is manifested that has not hitherto been

sufficiently regarded, and to which I have applied the term

_summer-sleep_.[JZ] Drought and a continuous high temperature act like

the cold of winter in reducing excitability. Madagascar, excepting a

very small portion of its southern extremity, lies within the tropics,

and here, as was already observed by Bruguière, the hedgehog-like

Tenrecs (_Centeres_, Illiger), one species of which (_C. ecaudatus_)

was introduced into the Isle of France (20° 9′, latitude), sleep

during excessive heat. The objection advanced by Desjardins, that the

time of their sleep falls within the season of winter in the southern

hemisphere, can scarcely be regarded as applicable in reference to a

country, where the mean temperature of the coldest month is nearly 7°

Fahr. above that of the hottest month in Paris; and this circumstance

cannot therefore change the three months’ summer-sleep of the Tenrec

in Madagascar and Port Louis (Isle of France) into actual hybernation.

In a similar manner, the Crocodile in the Llanos of Venezuela, the

land and water Tortoises on the Orinoco, and the colossal Boa, and

many of the smaller species of serpents, lie torpid and motionless in

the hardened ground, throughout the hot and dry season of the year.

The missionary Gilij relates, that the natives, in seeking the dormant

Terekai (land-tortoises), which lie buried in dry mud to the depth of

16 or 17 inches, are often bitten by serpents suddenly awakened, and

which had buried themselves with the tortoises. An admirable observer,

Dr. Peters, who has only just returned from the eastern coast of

Africa, writes to me as follows: “I could not obtain any certain

information regarding the Tenrec during my short stay in Madagascar,

but I am, on the other hand, well aware, that in the portion of

eastern Africa where I spent several years, different species of

tortoises (Pentonyx and Trionices) remain enclosed for months

together, without food, in the parched and indurated ground, during

the dry season of this tropical country. The _Lepidosiren_ also

remains motionless and coiled up in the hardened earth, from May to

December, wherever the swamps have been dried up.”

We thus meet with an enfeeblement of certain vital functions in

numerous and very different classes of animals, and, what is

peculiarly striking, without the same phenomenon presenting itself in

organisms nearly allied, and belonging to one and the same family. The

northern glutton (Gulo), allied to the badger (Meles), does not, like

the latter, sleep during the winter; whilst, according to Cuvier, “a

Myoxus (Dormouse of Senegal, Myoxus Coupeii) which had probably never

experienced a winter-sleep in its tropical home, fell into a state of

hybernation at the beginning of winter, the first year it was brought

to Europe.” This enfeeblement of the vital functions and vital

activity passes through several gradations, according as it extends to

the processes of nutrition, respiration and muscular movement, or

induces a depression of the cerebral and nervous systems. The

winter-sleep of the solitary bear and of the badger is not attended

with rigidity, and hence the awakening of these animals is easy, and,

as I frequently heard in Siberia, very dangerous to the hunters and

country people. The recognition of the gradation and connection of

these phenomena leads us to the so-called _vita minima_ of the

microscopic organisms, which occasionally fall in the Atlantic in

showers of meteoric dust, and some of which have green ovaries and are

engaged in a self-generating process. The apparent revivification of

the Rotifera and of the siliceous-shelled Infusoria is only the

renewal of long enfeebled vital functions—a condition of vitality

never entirely extinguished, but merely revived by excitation.

Physiological phenomena can only be comprehended by being traced

through the entire series of analogous modifications.

Footnote 74:

p. 211—“_Winged Insects_.”

The fructification of diœcious plants was at one time principally

ascribed to the agency of the wind. It has been shown by Kölreuter,

and also with much ingenuity by Sprengel, that bees, wasps and

numerous small winged insects, are the main agents in this process. I

use the phrase “main agents”, since I cannot regard it as consonant to

nature that fructification should be impossible without the

intervention of these insects, as Willdenow has also fully shewn.[KA]

On the other hand dichogamy, sap-marks, (_maculæ indicantes_),

coloured spots indicating the presence of honey-vessels, and

fructification by insects, appear to be almost inseparable from one

another.[KB]

The statement often repeated since Spallanzani, that the diœcious

common hemp (_Cannabis sativa_), which was introduced into Europe from

Persia, bears ripe seeds without being in the neighbourhood of

pollen-tubes, has been entirely refuted by more recent investigations.

When seeds have been obtained, anthers in a rudimentary state have

been found near the ovarium, and these may have been capable of

yielding some grains of fructifying pollen. Such hermaphrodism is

frequent in the whole family of _Urticeæ_, but a singular and hitherto

unexplained phenomenon is manifested in the forcing-houses at Kew by a

small New Holland shrub, the Cœlebogyne of Smith. This phanerogamic

plant brings forth seeds in England without exhibiting any trace of

male organs, and without the bastard introduction of the pollen of any

other plant. “A species of Euphorbiaceæ,” (?) writes the distinguished

botanist, Jussieu, “the _Cœlebogyne_, which, although but recently

described, has been cultivated for many years in English

conservatories, has several times borne seeds, which were evidently

perfect, since the well-formed embryos they contained have produced

similar plants. The most careful observations have hitherto failed in

discovering the slightest trace of anthers or even pollen in the

flowers, which are diœcious. No male plants of this kind are known to

exist in England. The embryo cannot therefore have come from the

pollen, which is wholly deficient, but must have been formed entirely

in the ovule.”[KC]

In order to obtain a fresh and confirmatory explanation of this

important and isolated physiological phenomenon, I lately addressed

myself to my young friend, Dr. Joseph Hooker, who after having

accompanied Sir James Ross in his Antarctic voyage, has now joined the

great Thibeto-Himalayan expedition. Dr. Hooker wrote to me as follows

from Alexandria, at the close of December, 1847, prior to his

embarkation at Suez: “Our Cœlebogyne still flowers with my father at

Kew, as well as in the Gardens of the Horticultural Society. It ripens

its seeds regularly. I have repeatedly examined it with care, but have

never been able to discover a penetration of pollen utricles into the

stigma, nor any traces of their presence in the latter or in the

style. In my herbarium the male blossoms are in small catkins.”

Footnote 75:

p. 212—“_Like luminous stars_.”

The phosphorescence of the ocean is one of those splendid phenomena of

nature which excite our admiration, even when we behold its recurrence

every night for months together. The ocean is phosphorescent in all

zones of the earth, but he who has not witnessed the phenomenon in the

tropics, and especially in the Pacific, can form but a very imperfect

idea of the majesty of this brilliant spectacle. The traveller on

board a man-of-war, when ploughing the foaming waves before a fresh

breeze, feels that he can scarcely satisfy himself with gazing on the

spectacle presented by the circling waves. Wherever the ship’s side

rises above the waves, bluish or reddish flames seem to flash

lightning-like upwards from the keel. The appearance presented in the

tropical seas on a dark night is indescribably glorious, when shoals

of dolphins are seen sporting around, and cutting the foaming waves in

long and circling lines, gleaming with bright and sparkling light. In

the Gulf of Cariaco, between Cumana and the Peninsula of Maniquarez, I

have spent hours in enjoying this spectacle.

Le Gentil and the elder Forster ascribed these flames to the

electrical friction of the water on the vessel as it glides forward—an

explanation that must, in the present condition of our physical

knowledge, be regarded as untenable.[KD]

There are probably few subjects of natural investigation which have

excited so many and such long-continued contentions as the

phosphorescence of sea-water. All that is known with certainty

regarding this much disputed question may be reduced to the following

simple facts. There are many luminous mollusca which possess the

property when alive of emitting at will a faint phosphoric light;

which is of a bluish tinge in _Nereis noctiluca_, _Medusa pelagica

var._ β,[KE] and in the pipe-like _Monophora noctiluca_, discovered in

Baudin’s expedition.[KF] The luminosity of sea-water is in part owing

to living light-bearing animals, and in part to the organic fibres and

membranes of the same, when in a state of decomposition. The

first-named of these causes of the phosphorescence of the ocean is

undoubtedly the most common and the most widely diffused. The more

actively and the more efficiently that travellers engaged in the study

of nature have learnt to employ powerful microscopes, the more our

zoological systems have been enriched by new groups of mollusca and

infusoria, whose property of emitting light either at will or from

external stimulus has been recognised.

The luminosity of the sea, as far as it depends on living organisms,

is principally owing, among zoophytes, to the Acalephæ (the families

of Medusæ and Cyaneæ), to some Mollusca, and to an innumerable host of

Infusoria. Among the small Acalephæ (Sea-nettles), the _Mammaria

scintillans_ presents us, as it were, with the glorious image of the

starry firmament reflected in the surface of the sea. When full-grown

this little creature scarcely equals in size the head of a pin. The

existence of siliceous-shelled luminous infusoria was first shown by

Michaelis at Kiel. He observed the coruscation of the Peridinium. (a

ciliated animalcule,) of the Cuirass-monad (_Prorocentrum micans_),

and of a rotifer, which he named Synchata baltica,[KG] the same that

Focke subsequently found in the lagoons of Venice. My distinguished

friend and fellow traveller in Siberia, Ehrenberg, succeeded in

keeping two luminous Infusoria of the Baltic alive for nearly two

months at Berlin. I examined them with him in 1832; and saw them

coruscate in a drop of sea-water on the darkened field of the

microscope. When these luminous Infusoria (the largest of which was

only ⅛ and the smallest from ¹⁄₄₈ to ¹⁄₉₆ of a of a Parisian line in

length) were exhausted, and ceased to emit sparks, they would renew

their flashing on being stimulated by the addition of acids or by the

application of a little alcohol to the sea-water.

By repeatedly filtering fresh sea-water, Ehrenberg succeeded in

procuring a fluid in which a large number of these light-emitting

animalcules were accumulated.[KH] This acute observer has found in the

organs of the Photocharis which give off flashes of light (either

voluntarily or when stimulated), a cellular structure of a gelatinous

character in the interior, and which manifests some similarity with

the electric organ of the Gymnotus and the Torpedo. “When the

Photocharis is irritated, in each cirrus a kindling and a gleaming of

separate sparks may be observed, which gradually increase and at

length illuminate the whole cirrus; until the living flame runs also

over the back of this nereid-like animalcule, making it appear under

the microscope like a burning thread of sulphur with a greenish-yellow

light. In the _Oceania (Thaumanthias) hemisphærica_, the number and

position of the sparks correspond accurately, at the thickened base,

with the larger cirri or organs which alternate with them, a

circumstance that merits special attention. The manifestation of this

wreath of fire is an act of vitality, and the whole development of

light an organic vital process, which exhibits itself in Infusorial

animals as a momentary spark of light, and is repeated after short

intervals of rest.”[KI]

The luminous animals of the ocean appear, from these conjectures, to

prove the existence of a magneto-electric light-generating vital

process in other classes of animals besides fishes, insects, mollusca,

and acalephæ. Is the secretion of the luminous fluid which is effused

in some animalcules, and which continues to shine for a long period

_without further influence of the living organism_ (as, for instance,

in Lampyrides and Elaterides, in the German and Italian glow-worms,

and in the South American Cucuyo of the sugar-cane), merely the

consequence of the first electric discharge, or is it simply dependent

on chemical composition? The luminosity of insects surrounded by air

assuredly depends on physiological causes different from those which

give rise to a luminous condition in aquatic animals, fishes, Medusæ,

and Infusoria. The small Infusoria of the ocean, being surrounded by

strata of salt-water which constitutes a powerful conducting medium,

must be capable of an enormous electric tension of their flashing

organs to enable them to shine so vividly in the water. They strike

like the Torpedo, the Gymnotus, and the Electric Silurus of the Nile,

through the stratum of water: whilst electric fishes which, in

connection with the galvanic circuit, are capable of decomposing

water, and of imparting magnetic power to steel needles. (as I showed

more than half a century ago,[KJ] and as John Davy has more recently

confirmed,[KK]) yield no indications of electricity through the

smallest intervening stratum of flame.

The considerations which we have here developed render it probable

that one and the same process operates, alike in the smallest living

organisms invisible to the naked eye, in the contests of the

serpent-like Gymnoti, in the flashing luminous Infusoria which impart

such glorious brilliancy to the phosphorescence of the sea, in the

thunder-cloud and in the terrestrial or polar light (the silent

magnetic flashes), which, caused by an increased tension of the

interior of the earth, are announced, for some hours previously, by

the sudden variations of the magnetic needle.[KL]

Sometimes one cannot, even with high magnifying powers, discover any

animalcules in the luminous water; and yet, wherever a wave breaks in

foam against a hard body, and, indeed, wherever water is violently

agitated, flashes of light become visible. The cause of this

phenomenon depends probably on the decomposing fibres of dead

Mollusca, which are diffused in the greatest abundance throughout the

water. If this luminous water be filtered through finely woven cloths,

the fibres and membranes appear like separate luminous points. When we

bathed at Cumana, in the gulf of Cariaco, and walked naked on the

solitary beach in the beautiful evening air, parts of our bodies

remained luminous from the bright fibres and organic membranes which

adhered to the skin, nor did they lose this light for some minutes. If

we consider the enormous quantity of Mollusca which animate all

tropical seas, we can hardly wonder that sea-water should be luminous,

even where no fibres can be visibly separated from it. From the

endless subdivision of the masses of dead _Dagysæ_ and _Medusæ_ the

whole ocean may, in fact, be regarded as a fluid containing gelatine,

and, as such, luminous and of a nauseous taste; unfit for the use of

man, but capable of affording nourishment to many species of fish. On

rubbing a board with a portion of the _Medusa hysocella_, the surface

thus rubbed recovers its phosphorescence when friction is applied by

means of the dry finger. During my voyage to South America I

occasionally placed a Medusa on a tin plate, and I then observed that

if I struck the plate with another metallic substance the slightest

vibrations of the tin were sufficient to cause the animal to emit

light. How do the blow and the vibrations here act? Is the temperature

momentarily augmented, or are new surfaces presented? or, again, does

some gaseous matter such as phosphuretted hydrogen, exude in

consequence of this impulse, and burn when it comes in contact with

the oxygen of the atmosphere, or with that dissolved in the sea-water,

and by which the respiration of the Mollusca is maintained? This

light-exciting effect of the blow is most remarkable in a cross or

sugar-loaf sea, (_mer clapoteuse_,) where the waves, clashing from

opposite directions, rise in a conical form.

I have seen the ocean, in the tropics, luminous in the most opposite

kinds of weather, but most strongly so before a storm, or in a sultry

and hazy atmosphere with thick clouds. Heat and cold appear to

exercise but little influence on this phenomenon, for, on the Bank of

Newfoundland, the phosphorescence is frequently very brilliant in the

severest winter. Occasionally, too, the sea will be highly luminous

one night, and not at all so on the following, notwithstanding an

apparent identity of external conditions. Does the atmosphere favour

this development of light? or do all the differences observed during

this phenomenon depend on the accidental circumstance of the sea being

more or less impregnated, in some parts, with the gelatinous portions

of mollusca? Perhaps these phosphorescent social animalcules only rise

to the surface under certain conditions of the atmosphere. It has been

asked, why our fresh-water swamps which are filled with polyps are not

phosphorescent. It would appear that, both in animals and plants, a

peculiar mixture of organic particles favours this development of

light; thus, for instance, the wood of the willow is more frequently

found to be luminous than that of the oak. In England, salt-water has

been rendered luminous by mixing herring-brine with it; indeed, it

will be easy for any one to convince himself by galvanic experiments,

that the luminosity of living animals depends on nervous irritation. I

have observed strong phosphorescence emitted from a dying _Elater

noctilucus_, on touching the ganglion of its fore leg with zinc and

silver. Medusæ also occasionally emit a stronger light at the moment

the galvanic circuit is completed.[KM]

Footnote 76:

p. 213—“_Which inhabits the lungs of the Rattlesnake of the tropics_.”

The animal which I formerly named an _Echinorhynchus_, and to which I

even applied the term _Porocephalus_, appears, on a closer inspection,

according to Rudolphi’s better grounded opinion, to belong to the

division of _Pentastoma_.[KN] It is found in the abdominal cavity and

the wide-celled lungs of a species of _Crotalus_, which, in Cumana,

occasionally infests even the interior of houses, and preys on mice.

The _Ascaris lumbrici_[KO] lives beneath the skin of the common

earth-worm, and is the smallest of all the species of Ascaris.

_Leucophra nodulata_, Gleichen’s pearl animalcule, has been observed

by Otto Friedrich Müller in the interior of the reddish _Nais

littoralis_.[KP] It is probable that these microscopic animals are, in

their turn, inhabited by others. All are surrounded by air, deficient

in oxygen, and copiously charged with hydrogen and carbonic acid. It

is extremely doubtful whether any animal could exist in _pure

nitrogen_, although such an opinion did, formerly indeed, seem

warranted with reference to Fischer’s _Cistidicola farionis_, since,

according to Fourcroy’s experiments, the swimming-bladder of fish was

presumed to contain air wholly devoid of oxygen. But the experiments

made by Erman, and confirmed by myself, prove that the

swimming-bladder of fresh-water fish never contains pure nitrogen.[KQ]

In sea fish as much as 0·80 parts of oxygen have been found, while,

according to Biot’s views, the purity of the air depends on the depth

at which the fishes live.[KR]

Footnote 77:

p. 214—“_The united Lithophytes_.”

According to Linnæus and Ellis the calcareous Zoophytes, (among which

Madrepores, Meandrinæ, Astrææ, and Pocilloporæ especially produce

mural coral-reefs,) are inhabited and invested by animalcules, which

were long supposed to be allied to the Nereids belonging to Cuvier’s

Annelida (jointed worms). The anatomy of these gelatinous animalcules

has been made known by the acute and comprehensive researches of

Cavolini, Savigny, and Ehrenberg. We have learned that, in order to

understand the whole organism of the (so-called) rock-building

animals, we must not consider the scaffolding which remains after

their death, namely, the layers of lime formed into delicate lamellæ

by a vital function of secretion, as foreign to the soft membranes of

the food-receiving animal.

Besides our increased knowledge of the wonderful formation of the

living coral-stocks, a more correct view has gradually gained ground

respecting the extensive influence which the coral world has exercised

on the appearance of low island groups above the level of the sea, on

the migration of land-plants, and the successive extension of the

domain of the Floras, and, indeed, in some parts of the ocean, on the

distribution of the human race and of languages.

As minute social organisms the corals play an important part in the

general economy of nature, although they do not, as people began to

believe after Capt. Cook’s voyages of discovery, build up islands or

enlarge continents from almost unfathomable depths of the ocean. They

excite the liveliest interest, whether regarded as physiological

objects, and as illustrating the various gradations of animal form, or

in connection with the geography of plants, and the geognostic

relations of the earth’s crust. According to the comprehensive views

of Leopold von Buch, the whole Jura-formation consists of “large

elevated coral-banks of the ancient world, surrounding at a certain

distance the old mountain chains.”

According to Ehrenberg’s classification,[KS] coral-animals, (in

English works often incorrectly termed coral-insects,) are separable

into the monostomous _Anthozoa_, which are either free and with the

power of detaching themselves, as _Animal-corals_; or are attached in

the manner of plants, as _Phyto-corals_. To the first order

(Zoocorallia) belong the Hydras or Armpolyps of Trembley, the Actiniæ,

radiant with the most splendid colours, and the mushroom-corals; and

to the second order belong the Madrepores, the Astrææ, and the

Ocellinæ. The Polyps of the second order are those which from their

cellular, wave-resisting, wall-works are the principal subject of this

illustration. The wall-work is composed of the aggregate of the

coral-trunks, which, however, do not suddenly lose their combined

vitality, like a dead forest tree.

Every coral-trunk arises by a process of gemmation in accordance with

certain laws, and forms one complete structure, each portion being

formed by a great number of organically distinct individual animals.

In the group of Phyto-corals these cannot separate themselves

spontaneously, but remain united with one another by lamellæ of

carbonate of lime. Hence each coral-trunk by no means possesses a

central point of common vitality.[KT] The propagation of

coral-animals, according to the difference of the orders, is by eggs,

spontaneous division or gemmation. This last kind of propagation

presents the greatest variety of forms in the development of

individuals.

The Coral-reefs (or, as Dioscorides designates them, sea-plants, a

forest of stony-trees, Lithodendra), are of three kinds; namely,

_Coast-reefs_, (shore-reefs, fringing-reefs), which are directly

connected with continental or insular coasts, as on the north-east

coast of New Holland, between Sandy Cape and the dreaded Torres

Straits, and almost all the coral-banks of the Red Sea examined for

eighteen months by Ehrenberg and Hemprich; _Island-surrounding reefs_

(barrier-reefs, encircling-reefs), as at Vanikoro in the small

archipelago of Santa Cruz, north of the New Hebrides, and at

Puynipete, one of the Carolinas; and _Coral-banks surrounding lagoons_

(Atolls or Lagoon-islands). This very natural division and

nomenclature have been introduced by Charles Darwin, and are most

intimately connected with the very ingenious explanation which this

intellectual naturalist has given of the gradual origin of these

wonderful forms. While, on the one hand, Cavolini, Ehrenberg, and

Savigny have completed the scientific anatomical knowledge of the

organization of coral-animals, on the other, the geographical and

geological relations of coral-islands have been investigated, first by

Reinhold and George Forster in Cook’s second voyage, and then, after a

long interval, by Chamisso, Péron, Quoy and Gaimard, Flinders, Lütke,

Beechey, Darwin, d’Urville, and Lottin.

The coral-animals and their stony cellular scaffoldings belong, for

the most part, to the warm tropical seas; and the reefs occur most

frequently in the Southern Hemisphere. Thus we find the Atolls or

Lagoon Islands crowded together in the so-called coral-sea between the

north-east coast of New Holland, New Caledonia, Solomon’s Islands, and

the Louisiade Archipelago; in the group of the Low Islands (Low

Archipelago), eighty in number; in the Fidji, Ellice, and Gilbert

Islands; and in the Indian Ocean, north-east of Madagascar, under the

name of the Atoll group of Saya de Malha.

The great Chagos Bank, whose structure and dead coral-trunks have been

thoroughly investigated by Captains Moresby and Powell, is the more

interesting to us, because we may regard it as a prolongation of the

more northern Laccadive and Maldive Islands. I have previously

directed attention in another work[KU] to the importance of the order

of succession of the Atolls, which are exactly in the direction of a

meridian as far as 7° south lat., in reference to the general mountain

system, and the form of the earth’s surface, in Central Asia. The

meridian-chains, which mark the intersection of many mountain-systems

running from east to west at the great bend of the Thibetian river

Tzang-bo, correspond with the great meridian mountain rampart of the

Ghauts and of the more northern Bolor in further or trans-Gangetic

India. Here lie the parallel chains of Cochin China, Siam, and

Malacca, as well as those of Ava and Arracan, which, after courses of

unequal length, all terminate in the gulfs of Siam, Martaban, and

Bengal. The bay of Bengal appears like an arrested effort of nature to

produce an inland sea. A deep inbreak of the waters, between the

simple western system of the Ghauts, and the very complex eastern

trans-Gangetic system, has swallowed up a great part of the eastern

lowlands, but met with an impediment not so easily overcome in the

early existing and extensive table-land of Mysore.

An oceanic inbreak of this nature has given rise to two almost

pyramidal peninsulas of very different length and narrowness; and the

prolongation of two opposing meridian systems, the mountain system of

Malacca in the east, and the Ghauts of Malabar in the west, manifests

itself in submarine, symmetrical series of islands, on the one side in

the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are poor in corals, and on the

other in three long-extended archipelagos of Atolls—the Laccadives,

the Maldives, and Chagos. The last, called by mariners the Chagos

Bank, forms a lagoon, belted by a narrow, and already much broken

coral-reef. The length of this lagoon is 88, and its breadth 72 miles.

Whilst the enclosed lagoon is only from 17 to 40 fathoms deep, bottom

was scarcely found at a depth of 210 fathoms at a small distance from

the outer margin of the coral wall, which appears to be now

sinking.[KV] At the coral-lagoon, known as Keeling-Atoll, south of

Sumatra, Captain Fitz-Roy states, that at only 2000 yards from the

reef, no soundings were found with 7200 feet of line.

“The forms of coral, which in the Red Sea rise in thick wall-like

masses, are Mæandrinæ, Astrææ, Favia, Madrepores (Porites),

Pocillopora (Hemprichii), Millepores, and Heteropores. The latter are

among the most massive, although they are branched. The deepest coral

trunks, which magnified by the refraction of light, appear to the eye

to resemble the dome of a cathedral, belong, as far as could be

determined, to Mæandrinæ and Astrææ.”[KW] A distinction must be made

between single and in part free polyp-trunks, and those which form

wall-like rocks.

If the accumulation of building polyp-trunks in some regions is so

striking, it is no less astonishing to observe the perfect absence of

these structures in other and often adjacent regions. Their presence

or absence must be determined by certain, still uninvestigated,

relations of currents, by the partial temperature of the water, and by

the abundance or deficiency of nutriment. That certain

delicate-branched corals, with less calcareous deposition on the side

opposite to the mouth, prefer the stillness of the interior lagoons,

is not to be denied; but this preference for still water must not, as

has too often happened,[KX] be regarded as a peculiarity of the whole

class of these animals. According to the experiences of Ehrenberg and

Chamisso in the Red Sea and in the Marshall Islands, which abound in

Atolls and lie east of the Caroline Islands, and according to the

observations of Captains Bird Allen and Moresby in the West Indies and

in the Maldives, we find that living Madrepores, Millepores, Astræas,

and Mæandrinas, can support “a tremendous surf;”[KY] and indeed seem

to prefer localities the most exposed to the action of storms. The

vital forces of the organism regulating the cellular structure, which

with age acquires a rocky hardness, resist most triumphantly the

mechanical forces,—the shock of moving waters.

In the South Pacific there is a perfect absence of coral-reefs at the

Galapagos and along the whole of the west coast of the New Continent,

notwithstanding their vicinity to the numerous Atolls of the Low

Islands, and the Archipelago of Mendaña or the Marquesas. It is true

that the current of the South Pacific, which washes the coasts of

Chili and Peru. (and whose low temperature I observed in the year

1802,) is only 60°.1 Fahr., while the undisturbed water at the sides

of the cold current is from 81°.5 to 83°.7 Fahr. at Punta Parima,

where it deflects to the west. Moreover at the Galapagos there are

small currents between the islands, having a temperature of only 58°.3

Fahr. But this lower temperature does not prevail further northwards

along the coasts of the Pacific from Guayaquil to Guatimala and

Mexico, neither does it prevail in the Cape de Verd Islands, on the

whole west coast of Africa, or at the small islands of St. Paul, St.

Helena, Ascension, and San Fernando Noronha; yet in none of these are

there coral-reefs.

If this absence of reefs characterises the _western_ coasts of

America, Africa, and New Holland, they are, on the other hand, of

frequent occurrence on the _eastern_ coasts of tropical America, on

the African coast of Zanzibar, and on the southern coast of New South

Wales. The best opportunities I have enjoyed for personally examining

coral banks have been in the Gulf of Mexico, and south of the Island

of Cuba, in the so-called “Gardens of the King and Queen” (_Jardines y

Jardinillos del Rey y de la Reyna_). It was Christopher Columbus

himself who, on his second voyage, in May, 1494, gave this name to

this little group of islands, because from the pleasant association of

the silver-leaved arborescent Tournefortia gnapholoides, of flowering

species of Dolichos, of Avicennia nitida, and mangrove-thickets

(Rhizophora), the coral-islands formed as it were an archipelago of

floating gardens. “_Son Cayos verdes y graciosos llenos de

arboledas_,” says the admiral. On my voyage from Batabano to Trinidad

de Cuba, I remained for several days in these gardens, which lie to

the east of the great Isle of Pines, abounding in mahogany, for the

purpose of determining the longitude of the different _Cayos_.

The _Cayos Flamenco_, _Bonito_, _de Diego Perez_, and _de Piedras_,

are coral islands, rising only from 8 to 15 inches above the level of

the sea. The upper edge of the reef does not consist merely of dead

polyp-trunks, but is rather formed of a true conglomerate, in which

angular pieces of coral, lying in various directions, are embedded in

a cement composed of granules of quartz. In Cayo de Piedras I saw such

embedded masses of coral, some of them measuring upwards of three

cubic feet. Several of the West Indian smaller coral islands have

fresh water, a phenomenon which merits a careful investigation

wherever it occurs (as for instance near Radak in the South Sea),[KZ]

since it has sometimes been ascribed to hydrostatic pressure, acting

from a distant coast (as in Venice, and in the Bay of Xagua, east of

Batabano), and sometimes to the filtration of rain-water.[LA]

The living gelatinous covering of the calcareous fabric of the

coral-trunks attracts fishes and even turtles in search of food. In

the time of Columbus the now desolate district of the Jardines del Rey

was animated by a singular branch of industry pursued by the

inhabitants of the sea-coasts of Cuba, who availed themselves of a

little fish, the Remora, or sucking-fish (the so-called Ship-holder),

probably the Echeneis naucrates, for catching turtles. A long and

strong line, made of the fibres of the palm, was attached to the tail

of the fish. The Remora (called in Spanish _Reves_, or reversed,

because at first sight the back and abdomen might easily be mistaken

for each other), attaches itself by suction to the turtle through the

indented and moveable cartilaginous plates of the upper shell that

covers the head. The Remora, says Columbus, would rather let itself be

torn to pieces than relinquish its prey, and the little fish and the

turtle are thus drawn out of the water together. “Nostrates,” says

Martin Anghiera, the learned secretary of Charles V, “piscem Reversum

appellant, quod versus venatur. Non aliter ac nos canibus gallicis per

æquora campi lepores insectamur, illi (incolæ Cubæ insulæ) venatorio

pisce pisces alios capiebant.”[LB] We learn from Dampier and

Commerson, that this artifice of employing a sucking-fish to catch

other fishes is very common on the eastern coasts of Africa, near Cape

Natal and Mozambique, as well as on the island of Madagascar.[LC] An

acquaintance with the habits of animals, and the same necessities,

lead to similar artifices and modes of capture amongst tribes having

no connection with one another.

Although, as we have already remarked, the actual seat of the

Lithophytes who build calcareous walls, lies within a zone extending

from 22 to 24 degrees on either side of the equator, yet coral-reefs,

favoured, it is supposed, by the warm Gulf Stream, are met with around

the Bermudas in 32° 23′ lat., and these have been admirably described

by Lieutenant Nelson.[LD] In the southern hemisphere corals

(Millepores and Cellepores) are found singly as far as Chiloe and even

to the Chonos-Archipelago and Tierra del Fuego, in 53° lat., while

Retepores have even been found as far as 72½° lat.

Since Captain Cook’s second voyage, the hypothesis advanced by him as

well as by Reinhold and George Forster, that the flat coral islands of

the South Pacific have been built up by living agents from the depths

of the sea’s bottom, has found numerous advocates. The distinguished

naturalists Quoy and Gaimard, who accompanied Captain Freycinet on his

voyage of circumnavigation in the frigate “Uranie,” were the first who

expressed themselves, in 1823, with much freedom against the views

advanced by the two Forsters (father and son), by Flinders, and

Péron.[LE] “In directing the attention of naturalists to

coral-animalcules,” they say, “we hope to be able to prove that all

which has been hitherto affirmed or believed up to the present time,

regarding the immense structures they are capable of raising, is for

the most part inexact, and in all cases very greatly exaggerated. We

are rather of opinion that coral-animalcules, instead of rearing

perpendicular walls from the depths of the Ocean, only form strata or

incrustrations of some few toises in thickness.” Quoy and Gaimard (p.

289) have also expressed an opinion, that Atolls (coral walls

inclosing a lagoon) owe their origin to submarine volcanic craters.

They have undoubtedly underrated the depth at which animals who

construct coral-reefs (as for example the Astræa) can exist, as they

place the extreme limits at from 26 to 32 feet below the level of the

sea. Charles Darwin, a naturalist, who has known how to enhance the

value of his own observations by a comparison with those of others in

many parts of the world, places the region of living coral-animals at

a depth of 20 or 30 fathoms,[LF] which corresponds with that in which

Professor Edward Forbes found the greatest number of corals in the

Ægean Sea. This is Professor Forbes’s fourth region of marine-animals,

as given in his ingenious memoir on the _Provinces of Depth_, and the

geographical distribution of Mollusca at perpendicular distances from

the surface.[LG] It would appear, however, that the depth at which

corals live is very different in the different species, especially in

the more delicate ones which do not form such considerable structures.

Sir James Ross, in his Antarctic expedition, brought up corals from a

great depth with the lead; and these he remitted for accurate

examination to Mr. Stokes and Professor Forbes. Westward of Victoria

Land, in the neighbourhood of the Coulman Island, in 72° 31′ south

lat., and at a depth of 270 fathoms, Retepora cellulosa, a Hornera,

and Prymnoa Rossii. (the latter very similar to a species common to

the coasts of Norway,) were found alive and in a perfectly fresh

condition.[LH] In the far north too, the Greenland _Umbellaria

Grœnlandica_ has been brought up alive by whale fishers from a depth

of 236 fathoms.[LI] The same relation between species and locality is

met with among sponges, which however are now regarded as belonging

more to plants than to zoophytes. On the shores of Asia Minor, the

common marine sponge is brought up from depths varying from 5 to 36

fathoms, although one very small species of the same genus is only

found at a depth of at least 180 fathoms.[LJ] It is difficult to

divine what hinders the Astræas, Madrepores, Mæandrinas, and the whole

group of tropical phyto-corals, which are capable of constructing

large cellular calcareous walls, from living in very deep strata of

water. The decrease of temperature is very gradual, the diminution of

light nearly the same, and the existence of numerous Infusoria at

great depths of the Ocean proves that there cannot here be any

deficiency of food for polyps.

In opposition to the hitherto generally adopted opinion respecting the

absence of all organisms and living creatures in the Dead Sea, it is

worthy of notice that my friend and fellow-labourer, M. Valenciennes,

has received, through the Marquis Charles de l’Escalopier, and through

the French Consul Botta, beautiful specimens of Porites elongata from

the Dead Sea. This fact is the more interesting, because this species

is not found in the Mediterranean, but only in the Red Sea, which,

according to Valenciennes, has but few organisms in common with the

Mediterranean. As a sea-fish, a species of Pleuronectes, advances far

into the interior of France, and accustoms itself to gill-respiration

in fresh water, so also does a remarkable flexibility of organization

exist in the above-mentioned coral-animal (Porites elongata of

Lamarck), as the same species lives both in the Dead Sea, which is

supersaturated with salt, and in the open ocean near the Séchelles

Islands.[LK]

According to the most recent chemical analyses of the younger

Silliman, the genus Porites, like many other cellular coral-trunks

(Madrepores, Astræas, and Mæandrinas of Ceylon and the Bermudas),

contains besides from 92 to 95 per cent. of carbonate of lime and

magnesia, a portion of fluorine and phosphoric acid.[LL] The presence

of fluorine in the hard skeleton of the polyps reminds us of the

fluoride of calcium found in fish bones according to Morechini’s and

Gay-Lussac’s experiments at Rome. Silex is mixed only in very small

quantities, with the fluoride of calcium and phosphate of lime found

in the coral-trunks; but one coral animal allied to the Horn corals

(Gray’s _Hyalonema_, Glass thread) has an axis of fibres of pure

silex, resembling a hanging tuft of hair. Professor Forchhammer, who

has recently been engaged in a thorough analysis of sea-water in the

most opposite parts of the earth’s surface, finds the quantity of lime

in the Caribbean Sea remarkably small, it being only ²⁴⁷⁄₁₀₀₀₀, whilst

in the Cattegat it amounts to ³⁷¹⁄₁₀₀₀₀. He is disposed to ascribe

this difference to the numerous coral-banks near the West India

Islands, which appropriate the lime to themselves, and thus exhaust

the sea-water.[LM]

Charles Darwin has with great ingenuity developed the genetic

connection between shore-reefs, island-encircling reefs, and lagoon

islands, _i. e._, narrow, annular coral banks which surround inner

lagoons. According to his views, these three kinds of structure depend

upon the oscillating condition of the bottom of the sea, or on

periodical elevations and subsidences. The often-advanced hypothesis,

according to which the lagoon-islands, or atolls, mark by their

circularly enclosed coral-reefs, the outline of a submarine crater,

raised on a volcanic crater-margin, is opposed by the great extent of

their diameters, which are in some instances upwards of 30, 40, or

even 60 miles. Our fire-emitting mountains have no such craters, and

if we would compare the lagoon, with its submerged mural surface and

narrow encircling reef, with one of the annular lunar mountains, we

must not forget that these annular mountains are not volcanoes, but

tracts of land enclosed by walls. According to Darwin, the following

is the process of formation. An island mountain closely encircled by a

coral reef subsides, while the _fringing_ reef that had sunk with it,

is constantly recovering its level owing to the tendency of the coral

animals to regain the surface by renewed perpendicular structures;

these constitute first a reef encircling the island at a distance, and

subsequently, when the inclosed island has wholly subsided, an

_atoll_. According to this view, which regards islands as the most

prominent parts, or the culminating points of the submarine land, the

relative position of the coral islands would disclose to us what we

could scarcely hope to discover by the sounding line, viz., the former

configuration and articulation of the land. This attractive subject

(to the connection of which with the migrations of plants and the

distribution of the races of men we drew attention at the beginning of

this note), can only be fully elucidated when we shall succeed in

acquiring further knowledge of the depth and nature of the different

rocks which serve as a foundation for the lower strata of the dead

polyp-trunks.

Footnote 78:

p. 216—“_Of the Samothracian Traditions_.”

Diodorus has preserved to us these remarkable traditions, the

probability of which has invested them with almost historical

certainty in the eyes of geologists. The island of Samothrace, once

also named Ethiopea, Dardania, and Leucania or Leucosia in the

Scholiast of Apollonius Rhodius, the seat of the ancient mysteries of

the Cabiri, was inhabited by the remnant of an aboriginal people,

several words of whose vernacular language were preserved in later

times in sacrificial ceremonies. The position of Samothrace, opposite

to the Thracian Hebrus, and near the Dardanelles, explains why a more

circumstantial tradition of the great catastrophe of an outburst of

the waters of the Pontus (Euxine) should have been especially

preserved in this island. Sacred rites were here performed at altars

erected on the supposed limits of this inundation; and among the

Samothracians, as well as the Bœetians, a belief in the periodical

destruction of the human race (a belief which also prevailed among the

Mexicans in their myth of the four destructions of the world) was

associated with historical recollections of individual

inundations.[LN] According to Diodorus, the Samothracians related that

the Black Sea had been an inland lake, which, swelled by the influx of

rivers (long prior to the inundations which had occurred among other

nations) had burst, first through the straits of the Bosphorus, and

subsequently through those of the Hellespont.[LO] These ancient

revolutions of nature have been considered in a special treatise, by

Dureau de la Malle, and all the facts known regarding them collected

by Carl von Hoff, in an important work on the subject.[LP] The

Samothracian traditions seem reflected as it were in the Sluice-theory

of Strato of Lampsacus, according to which the swelling of the waters

in the Euxine first formed the passage of the Dardanelles, and next

the opening through the Pillars of Hercules. Strabo, in the first book

of his Geography, has preserved among the critical extracts from the

works of Eratosthenes, a remarkable fragment of the lost work of

Strato, which presents views that embrace almost the whole

circumference of the Mediterranean.

“Strato of Lampsacus,” says Strabo,[LQ] “enters more fully than the

Lydian Xanthus (who has described the impressions of shells far from

the sea) into a consideration of the causes of these phenomena. He

maintains, that the Euxine had formerly no outlet at Byzantium, but

that the pressure of the swollen mass of waters caused by the influx

of rivers had opened a passage, whereupon the water rushed into the

Propontis and the Hellespont. The same thing also happened to _our_

sea (the Mediterranean), for here too a passage was opened through the

isthmus at the Pillars of Hercules, in consequence of the filling of

the sea by currents, which in flowing off left the former swampy banks

uncovered and dry. In proof of this, Strato affirms, first, that the

outer and inner bottoms of the sea are different; then that there is

still a bank running under the sea from Europe to Lybia, which shows

that the inner and outer sea were formerly not united; next that the

Euxine is extremely shallow, while the Cretan, the Sicilian and the

Sardinian seas are, on the contrary, very deep; the cause of this

being that the former is filled with mud from the numerous large

rivers flowing into it from the north. Hence too the Euxine is the

freshest, and the streams flowing from it are directed towards the

parts where the bottom is deepest. It would also appear that if these

rivers continue to flow into the Euxine, it will some day be

completely choked with mud, for even now, its left side is becoming

marshy in the direction of Salmydessus (the Thracian Apollonia), at

the part called by mariners ‘The Breasts,’ before the mouth of the

Ister and the desert of Scythia. Perhaps, therefore, the Lybian Temple

of Ammon may also have once stood on the sea-shore, its present

position in the interior of the country being in consequence of such

off-flowings of rivers. Strato also conjectures that the fame and

celebrity of the Oracle (of Ammon) is more easily accounted for, on

the supposition that the temple was on the sea-shore, since its great

distance from the coast would otherwise make its present distinction

and fame inexplicable. Egypt also was in ancient times overflowed by

the sea as far as the marshes of Pelusium, Mount Casius, and Lake

Serbonis; for whenever in digging it happened that salt-water was met

with, the borings passed through strata of sea-sand and shells, as if

the country had been inundated, and the whole district around Mount

Casius and Gerrha had been a marshy sea, continuous with the Gulf of

the Red Sea. When the sea (the Mediterranean) retreated, the country

was uncovered, leaving, however, the present Lake Serbonis.

Subsequently the waters of this lake also flowed off, converting its

bed into a swamp. In like manner the banks of Lake Mœris resemble more

the shores of a sea than those of a river.” An erroneous reading

introduced as an emendation by Grosskurd, in consequence of a passage

in Strabo,[LR] gives in place of Mœris, “the Lake Halmyris,” but the

latter was situated near the southern mouth of the Danube.

The Sluice-theory of Strato led Eratosthenes of Cyrene (the most

celebrated in the series of the librarians of Alexandria) to

investigate the problem of the uniformity of level in all external

seas flowing round continents, although with less success than

Archimedes in his treatise on floating bodies.[LS] The articulation of

the northern coasts of the Mediterranean as well as the form of its

peninsulas and islands had given origin to the geognostic myth of the

ancient land of Lyctonia. The origin of the lesser Syrtis, of the

Triton Lake,[LT] and of the whole of Western Atlas,[LU] had been

embodied in an imaginary scheme of fire-eruptions and earthquakes.[LV]

I have recently entered more fully into this question,[LW] in a

passage with which I would be allowed to close this note:

“The northern shore of the Mediterranean possesses the advantage of

being more richly and variously articulated than the southern or

Lybian shore, and this was, according to Strabo, already noticed by

Eratosthenes. Here we find three peninsulas, the Iberian, the Italian,

and the Hellenic, which, owing to their various and deeply indented

contour, form, together with the neighbouring islands and the opposite

coasts, many straits and isthmuses. Such a configuration of continents

and of islands that have been partly severed and partly upheaved by

volcanic agency in rows, as if over far-extending fissures, early led

to geognostic views regarding eruptions, terrestrial revolutions, and

outpourings of the swollen higher seas into those below them. The

Euxine, the Dardanelles, the Straits of Gades, and the Mediterranean

with its numerous islands, were well fitted to originate such a system

of sluices. The Orphic Argonaut, who probably lived in the Christian

era, has interwoven old mythical narrations in his composition. He

sings of the division of the ancient Lyctonia into separate islands,

‘when the dark-haired Poseidon in anger with Father Kronion struck

Lyctonia with the golden trident.’ Similar fancies, which may often

certainly have sprung from an imperfect knowledge of geographical

relations, were frequently elaborated in the erudite Alexandrian

school, which was so devoted to everything connected with antiquity.

Whether the myth of the breaking up of Atlantis be a vague and western

reflection of that of Lyctonia, as I have elsewhere shown to be

probable, or whether, according to Otfried Müller, ‘the destruction of

Lyctonia (Leuconia) refers to the Samothracian tradition of a great

flood, which changed the form of that district,’ is a question which

it is here unnecessary to decide.”

Footnote 79:

p. 217—“_Precipitation from the clouds_.”

The vertical ascent of currents of air is one of the principal causes

of the most important meteorological phenomena. Where a desert or a

sandy surface devoid of vegetation is surrounded by a high

mountain-chain, the sea-wind may be observed driving a dense cloud

over the desert, without any precipitation of vapour taking place

before it reaches the crest of the mountains. This phenomenon was

formerly very unsatisfactorily referred to an _attraction_ supposed to

be exercised by the mountain-chain on the clouds. The true cause

appears to lie in the ascent from the sandy plain of a column of warm

air, which prevents the condensation of the vesicles of vapour. The

more barren the surface, and the greater the degree of heat acquired

by the sand, the higher will be the ascent of the clouds, and the less

readily will the vapour be precipitated. Over the declivities of

mountains these causes cease. The play of the vertical column of air

is there weaker; the clouds sink, and their disintegration is effected

by a cooler stratum of air. Thus _deficiency of rain_ and _absence of

vegetation in the desert_ stand in a reciprocal action to one another.

It does not rain because the barren and bare surface of sand becomes

more strongly heated and radiates more heat; and the desert is not

converted into a steppe or grassy plain because without water no

organic development is possible.

Footnote 80:

p. 218—“_The indurating and heat-emitting mass of the earth_.”

If according to the hypothesis of the Neptunists (now long since

obsolete), the so-called primitive rocks were also precipitated from a

fluid, the transition of the earth’s crust from a condition of

fluidity to one of solidity, must have been followed by the liberation

of an enormous quantity of caloric, which would have given rise to new

evaporation and new precipitations. The more recent these

precipitations, the more rapid, the more tumultuous, and the more

uncrystalline would they have been. Such a sudden liberation of

caloric from the indurating crust of the earth, independent of the

latitude, and the position of the earth’s axis, might indeed occasion

local elevations of temperature in the atmosphere, which would

influence the distribution of plants. The same cause might also

occasion a kind of porosity which seems to be indicated by many

enigmatical geological phenomena in floetz rocks. I have developed my

conjectures on this subject in detail in a small memoir on primitive

porosity.[LX] According to the views I have more recently adopted, it

appears to me that the variously shattered and fissured earth, with

its fused interior, may long have continued in the primeval period, to

impart to its oxidised surface a high degree of temperature,

independent of its position with respect to the sun and to latitude.

What an influence would not, for instance, be exercised for ages to

come on the climate of Germany by an open fissure a thousand fathoms

in depth, extending from the Adriatic Gulf to the northern coast?

Although in the present condition of the earth, long-continued

radiation has almost entirely restored the stable equilibrium of

temperature first calculated by Fourier in his _Théorie analytique de

la Chaleur_, and the outer atmosphere is now only brought into direct

communication with the molten interior of the earth, by means of the

insignificant openings of a few volcanoes; yet in the primitive

condition of our planet, this interior emitted hot streams of air into

the atmosphere through the various clefts and fissures formed by the

frequently recurring foldings (or corrugations) of the mountain

strata. This emission was wholly independent of latitude. Every newly

formed planet must thus in its earliest condition have regulated its

own temperature, which was, however, subsequently changed and

determined by its position in relation to the central body, the sun.

The moon’s surface also exhibits traces of this reaction of the

interior upon the crust.

Footnote 81:

p. 218—“_The mountain-declivities of the most southern parts of

Mexico_.”

The spherical greenstone in the mountain district of Guanaxuato is

perfectly similar to that of the Fichtelberg in Franconia. Both form

grotesque domes, which break through and are superimposed on

transition argillaceous schists. In the same manner pearl-stone,

porphyritic schist, trachyte, and pitch-stone porphyry present

analogous forms in the Mexican mountains, near Cinapecuaro and Moran,

in Hungary, Bohemia, and in Northern Asia.

Footnote 82:

p. 220—“_The Colossal Dragon-tree of Orotava_.”

This colossal dragon-tree (Dracæna draco) stands in the garden of M.

Franqui, in the little town of Orotava, called formerly Taoro, one of

the most charming spots in the world. In June, 1799, when we ascended

the Peak of Teneriffe, we found that this enormous tree measured 48

feet in circumference. Our measurement was made at several feet above

the root. Nearer to the ground Le Dru found it nearly 79 feet. Sir G.

Staunton asserts that at an elevation of ten feet from the ground, its

diameter is still 12 feet. The height of the tree is not much more

than 69 feet. According to tradition it would appear that this tree

was venerated by the Guanches (as was the ash-tree of Ephesus by the

Greeks, the Plantain of Lydia, which Xerxes decorated with ornaments,

also the sacred Banyan-tree of Ceylon), and that in the year 1402,

which was the period of Béthencourt’s first expedition, it was as

large and as hollow as in the present day. When it is remembered that

the dragon-tree is everywhere of very slow growth, we may conclude

that the one at Orotava is of extreme antiquity. Berthollet says, in

his description of Teneriffe, “On comparing the young dragon-trees

which grows near this colossal tree, the calculations we are led to

make on the age of the latter strike the mind with astonishment.”[LY]

The Dragon-tree has been cultivated from the most ancient times in the

Canary isles, in Madeira, and Porto Santo, and that accurate observer,

Leopold von Buch, found it growing wild near Iguesti in Teneriffe. Its

original habitat is not therefore the East Indies, as has long been

believed; and its appearance does not afford any refutation of the

opinion of those who regard the Guanches as a wholly isolated

primitive Atlantic race, having no intercourse with African or Asiatic

nations: The form of the _Dracænæ_ is repeated on the southern

extremity of Africa, in the Isle of Bourbon, in China, and in New

Zealand. In these remotely distant regions we recognise species of the

same genus, but none are to be found in the New Continent, where this

form is supplied by the Yucca. The _Dracæna borealis_ of Aiton is a

true _Convallaria_, the nature of both being perfectly identical.[LZ]

I have given a representation, in the last plate of the Picturesque

Atlas of my American journey,[MA] of the dragon-tree of Orotava, taken

from a drawing made in 1776 by F. d’Ozonne, and which I found among

the posthumous papers of the celebrated Borda, in the still unprinted

journal entrusted to me by the Dépôt de la Marine, and from which I

have borrowed important astronomically-determined geographical, data

besides many barometrical and trigonometrical notices.[MB] The

measurement of the dragon-tree in the Villa Franqui was made in

Borda’s first voyage with Pingré in 1771, and not in the second, made

1776 with Varela. It is asserted, that in the fifteenth century,

during the early periods of the Norman and Spanish conquests, mass was

performed at a small altar erected in the hollow trunk of this tree.

Unfortunately, the Dracæna of Orotava lost one side of its leafy top

in the storm of the 21st of July, 1819. There is a fine large English

copper-plate engraving, which gives an exceedingly true representation

of the present condition of the tree.

The monumental character of these colossal living forms, and the

impression of reverence which they have created among all nations,

have led, in modern times, to a more careful study of the numerical

determination of their age, and of the size of their trunks. The

results of such investigations induced the elder Decandolle, (the

author of the important treatise, entitled _De la Longévité des

Arbres_,) Endlicher, Unger, and other distinguished botanists to

conjecture, that the age of many existing vegetable forms may extend

to the earliest historical times, if not to the records of the Nile,

at least to those of Greece and Italy. In the _Bibliothèque

Universelle de Genève_ (t. xlvii. 1831, p. 50) we find the following

passage: “Numerous examples seem to confirm the idea, that there still

exist, on our planet, trees of a prodigious antiquity—the witnesses,

perhaps, of one or more of its latest physical revolutions. If we

consider a tree as the combination of as many individual forms as

there have been buds developed on its surface, one cannot be surprised

if the aggregate resulting from the continual addition of new buds to

the older ones, should not necessarily have any fixed termination to

its existence.” In the same manner, Agardh says: “If in each solar

year new parts be formed in the plant, and the older hardened ones be

replaced by new parts capable of conducting sap, we have a type of

growth limited by external causes alone.” He ascribes the short

duration of the life of herbaceous plants, “to the preponderance of

the production of blossoms and fruit over the formation of leaves.”

Unfruitfulness in a plant insures a prolongation of its life.

Endlicher adduces the instance of an individual plant of Medicago

sativa, var. β versicolor, which lived eighty years because it bore no

fruit.[MC]

To the dragon-trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic development

of their closed vascular bundles, must be classed, in respect to their

floral parts, in the same natural family as Asparagus and the garden

onion, belongs the Adansonia, (the monkey bread-tree, _Baobab_),

undoubtedly among the largest and most ancient inhabitants of our

planet. In the earliest voyages of discovery made by Catalans and

Portuguese, the sailors were accustomed to carve their names on these

two species of trees; not always from a mere wish of perpetuating

their memory, but also as “marcos,” or signs of possession, and of the

rights which nations assume in virtue of first discovery. The

Portuguese mariners often selected for carving on the trees, as a

“marco,” or mark of possession, the elegant French motto _talent de

bien faire_, so frequently employed by the Infante Don Henrique, the

Discoverer. Thus Manuel de Faria y Sousa says expressly;[MD] “Era uso

de los primeros Navegantes de dexar inscrito el motto del Infante,

_talent de bien faire_, en la corteza de los arboles.”[ME] (It was the

custom of the early navigators to inscribe the motto of the Infante in

the bark of the trees.)

The above-named motto, cut on the bark of two trees by Portuguese

navigators in the year 1435, and therefore twenty-eight years before

the death of the Infante Don Henrique, Duke of Viseo, is singularly

connected, in the history of discoveries, with the discussions that

have arisen from a comparison of Vespucci’s fourth voyage with that of

Gonzalo Coelho (1503). Vespucci relates, that the Admiral’s ship of

Coelho’s squadron was wrecked on an island which was sometimes

supposed to be that of San Fernando Noronha; sometimes, Peñedo de San

Pedro; and sometimes, the problematical island of St. Matthew. The

last-named island was discovered on the 15th of October, 1525, by

Garcia Jofre de Loaysa in 2½ south lat., in the meridian of Cape

Palmas, and almost in the Gulf of Guinea. He remained there eighteen

days at anchor, and found crosses, orange-trees that had become wild,

and two trunks of trees having inscriptions that bore the date of

ninety years back.[MF] I have in another place,[MG] in an inquiry

regarding the trustworthiness of Amerigo Vespucci, more fully

considered this problem.

The oldest description of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata) is that of

the Venetian, Aloysius Cadamosto. (whose real name was Alvise da Ca da

Mosto) in 1454. He found at the mouth of the Senegal. (where he joined

Antoniotto Usodimare), trunks, whose circumference he estimated at 17

fathoms, or 112 feet.[MH] He might have compared them to dragon-trees,

which he had already seen. Perrottet says,[MI] that he had seen

monkey-bread fruit trees, which had a diameter of about thirty-two

feet, with a height of only from seventy to eighty-five feet. The same

dimensions had been given by Adanson in his voyage, 1748. The largest

trunks of the monkey bread-fruit trees, which he himself saw, in 1749,

some on one of the small Magdalena islands near Cape de Verd, and

others at the mouth of the Senegal, were from 26 to nearly 29 feet in

diameter, with a height of little more than 70 feet, and a top

measuring upwards of 180 feet across. Adanson, however, makes the

remark that other travellers had found trunks having a diameter of

about 32 feet.[MJ] French and Dutch sailors had carved their names on

the trunks in characters six inches in length. One of these

inscriptions was of the fifteenth century,[MK] while all the others

were of the sixteenth. From the depth of the cuts, which are covered

with new layers of wood,[ML] and from a comparison of the thickness of

trunks, whose various ages were known, Adanson computed the age of

trees having a diameter of 32 feet at 5150 years.[MM] He however

cautiously subjoins the following remarks, in a quaint mode of

spelling which I do not alter: “le calcul de l’aje de chake couche n’a

pas d’exactitude géometrike.” In the village of Grand Galarques, also

in Senegambia, the negroes have adorned the entrance of a hollow

Baobab with carvings cut out of wood still green. The inner cavity

serves as a place of general meeting in which the community debate on

their interests. This hall reminds us of the hollow (specus) in the

interior of a plantain in Lycia, in which the Roman ex-consul,

Lucinius Mutianus, entertained twenty-one guests. Pliny (xii. 3) gives

to a cavity of this kind the somewhat ample breadth of eighty Roman

feet. The Baobab was seen by René Caillié in the valley of the Niger

near Jenne, by Cailliaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm Peters along the

whole eastern coast of Africa, where this tree, which is called

_Mulapa_, _i.e._ _Nlapa-tree_, or more correctly _muti-nlapa_,

advances as far as Lourenzo Marques, almost to 26° south lat. The

oldest and thickest trunks seen by Peters “measured from 60 to 75 feet

in circumference.” Although Cadamosto observed, in the fifteenth

century, _eminentia non quadrat magnitudini_; and although

Golberry[MN] found, in the “Vallée des deux Gagnacks,” trunks only 64

feet in height whose diameter was 36 feet, this disproportion between

thickness and height must not be assumed to be general. “Very old

trees,” says the learned traveller, Peters, “lose their crowns by

gradual decay, while they continue to increase in circumference. On

the eastern coast of Africa one not unfrequently meets with trees

having a diameter of more than 10 feet which reach the height of

nearly 70 feet.”

While therefore the bold calculations of Adanson and Perrottet assign

to the Adansonias measured by them, an age of 5150 or even 6000 years,

which would make them coeval with the builders of the Pyramids, or

even with Menes, and would place them in an epoch when the Southern

Cross was still visible in Northern Germany;[MO] the more certain

estimations yielded by annular rings, and by the relation found to

exist between the thickness of the layer of wood and the duration of

growth, give us, on the other hand, shorter periods for our temperate

northern zone. Decandolle finds that of all European species of trees,

the yew attains the greatest age; and according to his calculations,

30 centuries must be assigned as the age of the _Taxus baccata_ of

Braburn in Kent, from 25 to 26 to the Scotch yew of Fortingal, and 14½

and 12 respectively to those of Crowhurst in Surrey and Ripon

(Fountains Abbey) in Yorkshire.[MP] Endlicher remarks that “another

yew-tree in the churchyard of Grasford, North Wales, which measures

more than 50 feet in girth below the branches, is more than 1400 years

old, whilst one in Derbyshire is estimated at 2096 years. In Lithuania

linden trees have been felled which measured 87 feet round, and in

which 815 annular rings have been counted.”[MQ] In the temperate zone

of the southern hemisphere some species of the Eucalyptus attain an

enormous girth, and as they at the same time attain a height of nearly

250 feet, they afford a singular contrast to our yew trees, which are

colossal only in thickness. Mr. Backhouse found in Emu Bay, on the

shore of Van Diemen’s Land, Eucalyptus trunks which, with a

circumference of 70 feet at the base, measured as much as 50 feet at a

little more than 5 feet from the ground.[MR]

It was not Malpighi, as has been generally asserted, but the

intellectual Michel Montaigne, who had the merit of first showing, in

1581, in his _Voyage en Italie_, the relation that exists between the

annual rings and the age of the tree.[MS] An intelligent artisan,

engaged in the preparation of astronomical instruments, first drew

Montaigne’s attention to the significance of the annual rings,

asserting that the part of the trunk directed towards the north had

narrower rings. Jean Jacques Rousseau entertained the same opinion;

and his Emile, when he loses himself in the forest, is made to direct

his course in accordance with the deposition of the layers of wood.

Recent phyto-anatomical observations[MT] teach us, however, that the

acceleration of vegetation as well as the remission of growth, and the

varying production of the circles of the ligneous bundles (annual

deposits) from the cambium cells, depend on other influences than

position with respect to the quarter of the heavens.

Trees which in the case of some examples attain a diameter of more

than 20 feet, and an age of many centuries, belong to very different

natural families. We may here instance Baobabs, Dragon trees, various

species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium distichum. (Rich.,) Pinus Lambertiana.

(Douglasii,) Hymenæa Courbaril, Cæsalpinieæ, Bombax, Swietenia

Mahagoni, the Banyan tree (_Ficus religiosa_), Liriodendron

tulipifera(?), Platanus orientalis, and our Lindens, Oaks, and Yews.

The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of the Mexicans

(_Cupressus disticha_, Linn., _Schubertia disticha_, Mirbel), of Santa

Maria del Tule, in the State of Oaxaca, has not a diameter of 60 feet,

as stated by Decandolle, but exactly 40½ feet.[MU] The two beautiful

Ahuahuetes which I have frequently seen at Chapoltepec (growing in

what was probably once a garden or pleasure ground of Montezuma)

measure, according to the instructive account in Burkardt’s travels

(bd. i. s. 268) only 36 and 38 feet in circumference, and not in

diameter, as has often been erroneously maintained. The Buddhists of

Ceylon venerate the colossal trunk of the sacred fig-tree of

Anurahdepura. The Banyan, which takes root by its branches, often

attains a thickness of 30 feet, and forms, as Onesicritus truly

expresses himself, a leafy roof resembling a many-pillared tent.[MV]

On the Bombax Ceiba see early notices from the time of Columbus in

Bembo.[MW]

Among those oak trees which have been very accurately measured, the

largest in Europe is undoubtedly the one near Saintes on the road to

Cozes, in the Department de la Charente inférieure. This tree, which

has an elevation of 64 feet, measures very nearly 30 feet in diameter

near the ground, while 5 feet higher up it is nearly 23 feet, and

where the main branches begin more than 6 feet. A little room, from 10

feet 8 inches to 12 feet 9 inches in width and 9 feet 7 inches in

height, has been cleared in the dead part of the trunk, and a

semi-circular bench cut within it from the green wood. A window gives

light to the interior, and hence the walls of this little room, which

is closed by a door, are gracefully clothed with ferns and lichens.

From the size of a small piece of wood that had been cut out over the

door, and in which two hundred ligneous rings were counted, the age of

the oak of Saintes must be estimated at 1800 or 2000 years.[MX]

With respect to the rose-tree (_Rosa canina_) reputed to be a thousand

years old, which grows in the crypt of the Cathedral of Hildesheim, I

learn from accurate information, based on authentic records, for which

I am indebted to the kindness of the Stadtgerichts-Assessor Römer,

that the main stem only has an age of eight hundred years. A legend

connects this rose-tree with a vow of the first founder of the

cathedral, Louis the Pious; and a document of the eleventh century

says, “that when Bishop Hezilo rebuilt the cathedral, which had been

burnt down, he enclosed the roots of the rose-tree within a vault

still remaining, raised on the latter the walls of the crypt, which

was re-consecrated in 1061, and spread the branches of the rose-tree

over its sides.” The stem, still living, is nearly 27 feet in height,

and only 2 inches thick, and spreads across a width of 82 feet over

the outer wall of the eastern crypt. It is undoubtedly of very

considerable antiquity, and well worthy of the renown it has so long

enjoyed throughout Germany.

If excessive size, in point of organic development, may in general be

regarded as a proof of a long protraction of life, special attention

is due, among the thalassophytes of the submarine vegetable world, to

a species of fucus, _Macrocystis pyrifera_, Agardh (_Fucus

giganteus_). This marine plant attains, according to Captain Cook and

George Forster, a length of 360 feet, and exceeds therefore the height

of the loftiest Coniferous trees, not excepting _Sequoia gigantea_,

Endl. (_Taxodium sempervirens_, Hook, and Arnott) of California.[MY]

Captain Fitz-Roy has confirmed this statement.[MZ] Macrocystis

pyrifera grows from 64° south lat. to 45° north lat., as far as the

Bay of San Francisco on the north-west coast of the New Continent;

indeed Joseph Hooker believes that this species of Fucus advances as

far as Kamtschatka. In the waters of the Antarctic seas it is even

seen floating between the pack-ice.[NA] The cellular band and

thread-like structures of the Macrocystis (which are attached to the

bottom of the sea by an adhesive organ resembling a claw) seem to be

limited in their length by accidental disturbing causes alone.

Footnote 83:

p. 220—“_Phanerogamic plants already recorded in herbariums_.”

Three questions must be carefully distinguished from one another: 1.

How many species of plants have been described in printed works? 2.

How many of those discovered—that is to say included in

herbariums—still remain undescribed? 3. How many species probably

exist on the surface of the earth? Murray’s edition of the Linnæan

system contains, including cryptogamic plants, only 10,042 species.

Willdenow, in his edition of the _Species Plantarum_ from 1797 to

1807, has described as many as 17,457 species of phanerogamia,

reckoning from Monandria to Polygamia diœcia. If to these we add 3000

species of cryptogamic plants, we shall bring the number as given by

Willdenow to 20,000. More recent investigations have shown how far

this estimate of the species described, and of those preserved in

herbariums, falls short of the truth. Robert Brown[NB] first

enumerated above 37,000 phanerogamia, and I at that time attempted to

describe the distribution of 44,000 species of phanerogamic and

cryptogamic plants, over the different portions of the world already

explored.[NC] Decandolle finds, on comparing Persoon’s _Enchiridium_

with his _Universal System divided into twelve families_, that more

than 56,000 species of plants may be enumerated from the writings of

botanists and European herbariums.[ND] If we consider how many new

species have been described by travellers since that time, (my

expedition alone afforded 3600 of the 5800 collected species of

equinoctial plants), and if we bear in mind that there are assuredly

upwards of 25,000 phanerogamic plants, cultivated in all the different

botanical gardens, we shall soon see how much Decandolle’s estimate is

below the truth. From our complete ignorance of the interior of South

America (Mato-Grosso, Paraguay, the eastern declivity of the Andes,

Santa-Cruz de la Sierra, and all the countries lying between the

Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Amazon, and Puruz), of Africa, of

Madagascar, and Borneo, and of Central and Eastern Asia, the idea

involuntarily presents itself to the mind that we are not yet

acquainted with one third, or probably even with one fifth part of the

plants existing on the earth. Drège has collected 7092 phanerogamic

species in Southern Africa alone; and he believes that the flora of

that region consists of more than 11,000 phanerogamic species, seeing

that in Germany and Switzerland, on an equal area (192,000 square

miles,) Koch has described only 3300, and Decandolle only 3645

phanerogamia in France. I would here also instance the new genera,

consisting partly of high forest trees, which are still being

discovered in the neighbourhood of large commercial towns in the

lesser Antilles, although they have been visited by Europeans for the

last three hundred years. Such considerations, which I purpose

developing more fully at the close of this illustration, seem to

verify the ancient myth of the Zend-Avesta, that “the creating

primeval force called forth 120,000 vegetable forms from the sacred

blood of the bull.”