This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ...voyage from Para to the Barra de Rio Negro taking jive days; when the botanist Spruce explored that country, no longer ago than 1850, the voyage from Para to Santorin, which is little more than half-way to the Barra, often required a month, Still, I should have more confidence in observations made by men who ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ...voyage from Para to the Barra de Rio Negro taking jive days; when the botanist Spruce explored that country, no longer ago than 1850, the voyage from Para to Santorin, which is little more than half-way to the Barra, often required a month, Still, I should have more confidence in observations made by men who have been a long time stationary in chosen spots, like Bates and Wallace and Spruce, than in those made at steam pace. Agassiz's observations on "glacial phenomena " in Brazil are certainly very astonishing indeed; so astonishing that I have very great difficulty in believing them. They shake my faith in the glacial system altogether;--or perhaps they ought rather to shake the faith in Agassiz. They seem to threaten a reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory. If Brazil was ever covered with glaciers, I can see no reason why the whole earth should not have been so. Probably the whole terrestrial globe was once " one entire and perfect icicle." Seriously, --to answer your questions;--there is nothing in the least northern, nothing that is not characteristically Brazilian, in the flora of the Organ mountains, t did not myself ascend any of the peaks, but Gardiner did, and made very rich collections, of which he has given an account in Sir VV. Hooker's Journal, and more compendiously in his volume of Travels. The vegetation consists of very curious dwarfish forms of those families and genera which are characteristic of tropical America, and especially of Brazil; together with representatives of some other groups which are widely diffused, but by no means northern. So also the vegetation of the table lands has many peculiar forms, but is composed mainly of under-shrubby and herbaceous species, of the same family and genera which in the forests...
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