Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The City Of Cumana, The Capital Of New Andalusia, Is A Mile Distant
From The Embarcadero, Or The Battery Of The Boca, Where We Landed,
After Having Passed The Bar Of The Manzanares.
We had to cross a
vast plain, called el Salado, which divides the suburb of the
Guayquerias from the sea-coast.
The excessive heat of the
atmosphere was augmented by the reverberation of the soil, partly
destitute of vegetation. The centigrade thermometer, plunged into
the white sand, rose to 37.7 degrees. In the small pools of salt
water it kept at 30.5 degrees, while the heat of the ocean, at its
surface, is generally, in the port of Cumana, from 25.2 to 26.3
degrees. The first plant we gathered on the continent of America
was the Avicennia tomentosa,8 (* Mangle prieto.) which in this
place scarcely reaches two feet in height. This shrub, together
with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena, and the cactus, cover soil
impregnated with muriate of soda; they belong to that small number
of plants which live in society like the heath of Europe, and which
in the torrid zone are found only on the seashore, and on the
elevated plains of the Andes.* (* On the extreme rarity of the
social plants in the tropics, see my Essay on the Geog. of Plants
page 19; and a paper by Mr. Brown on the Proteacea, Transactions of
the Lin. Soc. volume 10 page 1, page 23, in which that great
botanist has extended and confirmed by numerous facts my ideas on
the association of plants of the same species.) The Avicennia of
Cumana is distinguished by another peculiarity not less remarkable:
it furnishes an instance of a plant common to the shores of South
America and the coasts of Malabar.
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