We crossed some violent rapids before reaching the Mandavaca mission. The village, also called Quirabuena, has only sixty inhabitants. Most of these Christian settlements are in such a deplorable condition that over a stretch of 50 leagues we counted barely 200 people. The river banks were more populated before the arrival of the missionaries. The Indians retreated into the jungle towards the east as the plains on the west are uninhabited. They live for part of the year off the large ants I have already described. In Mandavaca we met a good missionary who had spent 'over twenty years of mosquitoes in the Casiquiare jungles' and whose legs were so spotted by mosquito bites that you could hardly see he was a white. He spoke of his isolation, and the sad necessity that forced him to witness how the most atrocious crimes went unpunished. In Vasiva a few years before an Indian chief had eaten one of his wives after taking her from her conuco and fattening her up with plenty of food. If the Guiana Indians eat human flesh it is not because of privations, or during rituals, but out of vengeance after a victory or, as the missionaries say, 'out of their perverted greed'. Victory over an enemy horde is celebrated with a feast where parts of prisoners' corpses are eaten. During the night an enemy family is attacked, or an enemy found by chance in the jungle is killed by a poisoned arrow. The corpse is cut up and brought home like a trophy. Civilization has led man to sense the unity of the human race, the bonds that link him to customs and languages which he does not know. Wild Indians hate all those who do not belong to their tribe or family. Indians who are at war with a neighboring tribe hunt them as we would animals in the wood. When they see unknown jungle Indians arrive at their mission they say: 'They must be related to us as we understand what they say. They recognize only their own family: a tribe is but a reunion of relations. They recognize family and kin ties, but not those of humanity in general. No feelings of compassion prevent them from killing women or children of an enemy tribe. These latter are their favorite food after a skirmish or ambush.

whether when a cool wind blows or during a dead and suffocating calm. From the great number of earthquakes that I have witnessed on both sides of the equator, on the continent and at sea, on coasts and 2, toises high, it appears to me that the Oscillations are quite independent of the previous state of the atmosphere. This opinion is shared by many educated people in the Spanish colonies whose experience of earthquakes, if not as extensive as mine, covers more years. Against this, scientific observers in Europe, where earthquakes are rare compared to America, tend to admit some close connections between the undulations of the ground and certain meteors that appear as if by chance at the same time. In Italy, for example, the sirocco and earthquakes are suspected to have some link; and in London, the frequency of shooting stars and those southern lights that have since often been observed by Dalton were considered as forerunners of those shocks felt from 1748 to 1756.

From the 14th to the 21st of May we slept out in the open air; but I cannot point out where exactly we camped. This country is so wild and so deserted that, apart from a few rivers, the Indians could not name anything from my compass bearings. No observations of stars could reassure me about our latitude. After passing the place where the Itinivini separates from the Casiquiare to go west towards the granite Daripabo hills, we found the muddy banks covered with bamboo. These arborescent gramina rise up to 20 feet; their stalks arch towards the top. It is a new species of long-leafed bamboo. Bonpland rejoiced to find one in flower. Nothing is more rare in the New World than seeing these gigantic gramina in flower. Mutis (117) herbalized for over twenty years without ever finding one in flower.

After more tiring climbing, and soaked from crossing the torrent so often, we reached the foot of the Cuchivano caverns. A wall of stone rises perpendicularly 800 toises up. In a zone where the fertility of nature everywhere hides the ground and rocks, it is rare to see a great mountain revealing naked strata in a perpendicular section. In the middle of this unfortunately inaccessible cutting, the two caverns open out in the form of a crevice. We were assured that nocturnal birds, the same as those that lived in the Cueva del Guàcharo at Caripe, lived there.

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

The Indians told us that the jungles which cover the banks of the Sipapo abound in the climbing plant called bejuco de maimure. This species of liana is very important for the Indians as they weave baskets and mats from it. The Sipapo jungles are completely unknown. It is there that the missionaries place the Rayas tribe, whose mouths are said to be in their navels, perhaps due to the analogy with rays, whose mouths appear to be halfway down their bodies. An old Indian we met at Carichana, who boasted that he had often eaten human flesh, had seen these headless people with his own eyes'.

We could have included all these details in a work devoted solely to volcanoes in Peru and New Spain. Had I written the physical description of a single province I could have incorporated separate chapters on geography, mineralogy and botany, but how could I break the narrative of our travels, or an essay on customs and the great phenomena of general physics, by tiresomely enumerating the produce of the land, or describing new species and making dry astronomical observations? Had I decided to write a book that included in the same chapter everything observed from the same spot, it would have been excessively long, quite lacking in the clarity that comes from a methodical distribution of subject matter. Despite the efforts made to avoid these errors in this narration of my journey, I am aware that I have not always succeeded in separating the observations of detail from the general results that interest all educated minds. These results should bring together the influence of climate on organized beings, the look of the landscape, the variety of soils and plants, the mountains and rivers that separate tribes as much as plants. I do not regret lingering on these interesting objects for modern civilization can be characterized by how it broadens our ideas, making us perceive the connections between the physical and the intellectual worlds. It is likely that my travel journal will interest many more readers than my purely scientific researches into the population, commerce and mines in New Spain.