If America does not occupy an important place in the history of mankind, and in the revolutions that have shattered the world, it does offer a wide field for a naturalist. Nowhere else does nature so vividly suggest general ideas on the cause of events, and their mutual interrelationships. I do not mean by this solely the overpowering vegetation and freshness of organic life, the different climates we experience as we climb the cordilleras and navigate those immense rivers, but also the geology and natural history of an unknown continent. A traveler can count himself lucky if he has taken advantage of his travels by adding new facts to the mass of those previously discovered!

The missionary led us into several ordered and extremely clean Indian huts. It was painful to see how Carib mothers forced their children from the earliest age to enlarge the calves of their legs, as well as mould their flesh in stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh. Bands of leather or cotton are tied tightly 2 inches apart and pulled hard so that the muscles in between swell out. Our swaddled children suffer far less than the Carib children, who are meant to be closer to nature. The monks, ignorant of Rousseau's works (132) and even of his name, are unable to prevent this ancient physical education; man from the jungle, whom we believed to be so simple in customs, is far from docile when it comes to his dress and ideas about beauty and well-being. I was also surprised to see that the torture imposed on these children in no way hindered their blood circulation or their muscular movements. There is no tribe that is stronger or runs faster than the Caribs.

Lake Valencia, called Tacarigua by the Indians, is larger than Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland; its general form resembles Lake Geneva, situated at about the same altitude. Its opposite banks are notably different: the southern one is deserted, stripped of vegetation and virtually uninhabited; a curtain of high mountains gives it a sad, monotonous quality; in contrast, the northern side is pleasant and rural, and has rich plantations of sugar cane, coffee and cotton. Paths bordered with cestrum, azedaracs, and other perpetually flowering shrubs cross the plain and link the isolated farms. All the houses are surrounded by trees. The ceiba (Bombax hibiscifolius), with large yellow flowers, and the erythrina, with purple ones, whose overlapping branches give the countryside its special quality. During the season of drought, when a thick mist floats above the burning ground, artificial irrigation keeps the land green and wild. Every now and then granite blocks pierce through the cultivated ground; large masses of rocks rise up in the middle of the valley. Some succulent plants grow in its bare and cracked walls, preparing mould for the coming centuries. Often a fig tree, or a clusia with fleshy leaves, growing in clefts, crowns these isolated little summits With their dry withered branches they look like signals along a cliff. The shape of these heights betrays the secret of their ancient origins; for when the whole valley was still submerged and waves lapped the foot of the Mariara peaks (El Rincòn del Diablo) and the coastal chain, these rocky hills were shoals and islands.

The amount of identical species in the two continents and in the two hemispheres is far less than early travelers once led us to think. The high mountains of equinoctial America have their plantains, valerians, arenarias, ranunculuses, medlars, oaks and pines, which from their features we could confuse with European ones, but they are all specifically different. When nature does not present the same species, she repeats the same genera. Neighboring species are often found at enormous distances from each other, in low regions of a temperate zone, and on mountains on the equator. And, as we found on La Silla at Caracas, they are not the European genera that have colonized mountains of the torrid zone, but genera of the same tribe, which have taken their place and are hard to distinguish

When you travel through Carib missions and observe the order and submission there it is hard to remind yourself that you are among cannibals. This American word, of doubtful origin, probably comes from the Haitian or Puerto Rican language. It passed into European languages from the fifteenth century as a synonym for anthropophagy. I do not doubt that the conquering island Caribs were cruel to the Ygneris and other West Indian inhabitants, who were so weak and unwarlike; but their cruelty has been exaggerated because the first discoverers listened only to stories from conquered tribes. All the missionaries that I asked assured me that the Caribs are perhaps the least cannibalistic of the New World tribes. Perhaps the desperate way in which the Caribs fought the Spaniards, which led in 1504 to a royal decree declaring them to be slaves, contributed to their fame for ferocity. It was Christopher Columbus who first decided to attack the Caribs and deny them their freedom and natural rights; he was a fifteenth-century man, and less humane than is thought today. In 1520 Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the Spanish Court to decide which South American tribes were Caribs, or cannibals, and which were Guatiaos, or peaceful and friendly to Spain. His ethnographic piece, called El auto de Figueroa, is one of the most curious records of the early conquistadores' barbarism. Without paying attention to languages, any tribe that was accused of eating prisoners was called Carib. All the tribes that Figueroa called Carib were condemned to slavery; they could be sold at will or exterminated. It was after these bloody wars, and the death of their husbands, that Carib women, d'Anghiera says, became known as Amazons.

That the Cross is nearly perpendicular when it passes the meridian is known to all who inhabit the Tropics. It has been observed at which hour of the night, in different seasons, the Cross is erect or inclined. How often have we heard our guides exclaim in the savannahs of Venezuela or in the desert stretching from Lima to Trujillo, 'Midnight is past, the Cross begins to bend! How those words reminded me of that moving scene where Paul and Virginie, seated near the source of the river Lataniers, chat together for the last time, and where the old man, at the sight of the Southern Cross, warns them that it is time to separate!