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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Two New
Species Of Lycopodium, The Thyoides, And The Aristatum, Are Seen
Lower Down, Near The Puerto De La Silla.
); A lepidium, which
appears identical with that of Virginia; and lastly, lycopodiaceous
plants and mosses, which cover the rocks and
Roots of the trees.
That which gives most celebrity in the country to the little
thicket, is a shrub ten or fifteen feet high, of the corymbiferous
family. The Creoles call it incense (incienso).* (* Trixis
nereifolia of M. Bonpland.) Its tough and crenate leaves, as well
as the extremities of the branches, are covered with a white wool.
It is a new species of Trixis, extremely resinous, the flowers of
which have the agreeable odour of storax. This smell is very
different from that emitted by the leaves of the Trixis
terebinthinacea of the mountains of Jamaica, opposite to those of
Caracas. The people sometimes mix the incienso of the Silla with
the flowers of the pevetera, another composite plant, the smell of
which resembles that of the heliotropium of Peru. The pevetera does
not, however, grow on the mountains so high as the zone of the
befarias; it vegetates in the valley of Chacao, and the ladies of
Caracas prepare from it an extremely pleasant odoriferous water.
We spent a long time in examining the fine resinous and fragrant
plants of the Pejual. The sky became more and more cloudy, and the
thermometer sank below 11 degrees, a temperature at which, in this
zone, people begin to suffer from the cold.
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