islands to construct others with their materials, and bearing on their surface convoys of trunks and branches. "The great river," says Herndon, the American, one of those adventurous travellers, "was frightful to contemplate. It rolled through the solitudes with a solemn and majestic air. Its waters appeared angry, threatening, pitiless; and the whole picture produced in my mind such painful emotions as one experiences during a funeral ceremony on board ship-the firing of minuteguns, the roar of the tempest, the splashing of the waves, and the sailors assembled on the deck to bury the dead in an angry sea."

THE ORINOCO.

ON approaching the granitic shores of Guiana, the navigator sees before him the wide mouth of a mighty river, which gushes forth like a shoreless sea, flooding the ocean around with fresh water. The green waves of the river, which assume a milky-white hue as they foam over the shoals, contrast with the indigo-blue of the sea, which marks the waters of the river in sharp outlines. The appearance of this region first convinced Columbus of the existence of an American continent. "Such an enormous body of water," concluded this acute observer of nature, "could only be collected from a river having a long course; the land therefore which supplied it must be a continent, and not an island." In his ignorance of

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DIMENSIONS OF THE RIVER.

the similarity of physiognomy which characterises all the products of the climate of palms, he imagined that the new continent was the eastern coast of the far-projecting Asia. The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers wafted to him by the land breeze,—all led him to suppose that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable traditions of the ancient world, flowed from paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.

The Orinoco occupies the third rank among the great rivers of South America. It is narrower at the mouth than either the La Plata or the Amazon; while its length does not exceed 1120 geographical miles. But in the interior of Guiana, 560 miles from its estuary, the width of the river at high water measures upwards of 17,265 feet.

If the Orinoco, in the delta formed by its variously divided and still unexplored branches, as well as in the regularity of its rise and fall, and in the number and size of its crocodiles, exhibits numerous points of resemblance to the Nile, there is this further analogy between the two rivers, that they, for a long distance, wind their impetuous way like forest-torrents between granitic and syenitic rocks; till, slowly rolling their waters over an almost horizontal bed, skirted by treeless they reach the sea.

THE DUIDA AND ITS VICINITY.

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"When, in the summer of 1800," writes Alexander von Humboldt, "we ascended the Upper Orinoco, we reached the mouths of the Lodomori and the Guapo. Here soars high above the clouds the mighty peak of the Yeonnamarri or Duida- a mountain which presents one of the grandest spectacles in the natural scenery of the tropical world. It is 8823 feet above the level of the sea. Its southern slope consists of treeless, grassy plains, redolent with the odour of pine-apples, whose fragrance scents the humid evening air. Among lowly meadowplants rise the juicy stems of the anana, whose goldenyellow fruit gleams from the midst of a bluish-green diadem of leaves. Where the mountain-springs break forth from beneath the grassy covering, rise isolated groups of lofty fan-palms, whose leaves in this torrid region are never stirred by a cooling breeze. To the east of the Duida mountain begins a thicket of wild cacao-trees, among which are found the celebrated almond-tree, the most luxurious product of a tropical vegetation. Here the Indians collect colossal stalks of grass, whose joints measure upwards of eighteen feet from knot to knot, which they use as blow-pipes for the discharge of their arrows. Some Franciscan monks have penetrated as far as the mouth of the Chiguire, where the river is already so narrow that the natives have suspended over it, near the waterfall of the Guaharibes, a bridge, woven of the stems of twining plants. The Guaciaos, of palish complexion and short stature, armed with poisoned arrcws, oppose all further progress