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contain nearly five per cent. of potash, sulphuret of iron, peroxide of iron, carbon, &c. The contact of so many moistened heterogeneous substances must necessarily lead them to a change of state and composition. The efflorescent salts that abundantly cover the aluminous slates of Robalo, shew how much these chemical effects are favoured by the high temperature of the climate; but, I repeat, in a rock where there are no crevices, no vacuities parallel to the direction and inclination of the strata, native alum, semitransparent and of conchoidal fracture, completely filling its place (its beds), must be regarded as of the same age with the rock in which it is contained. The term 66 contemporary formation" is here taken in the sense attached to it by geologists, in speaking of beds of quartz in clayslate, granular limestone in mica-slate, or feldspar in gneiss.

After having for a long time wandered over barren scenes, amidst rocks entirely devoid of vegetation, our eyes dwelt with pleasure on tufts of malpighia and croton, which we found in descending toward the coast. These arborescent crotons were of two new species,* very remarkable for their form, and peculiar to the peninsula of Araya. We arrived too late at the Laguna Chica, to visit another rock situated farther east, and celebrated by the name of the Laguna Grande, or the Laguna del Obispo.† We contented ourselves with admiring it from the height of the mountains that command the view; and, excepting the ports of Ferrol and Acapulco, there is perhaps none presenting a more extraordinary configuration. It is an inland gulf two miles and a half long from east to west, and one mile broad. The rocks of mica-slate that form the entrance of the port, leave a free passage only two hundred and fifty toises broad. The water is everywhere from fifteen to twenty-five fathoms deep. Probably the government of Cumana will one day take advantage of the possession of this inland gulf, and of that of Mochima,‡ eight leagues east of the bad road of Nueva Barcelona. The family of M. Navarete were waiting for us with impatience on the * Croton argyrophyllus, and C. marginatus.

Great Lake, or the Bishop's Lake.

This is a long narrow gulf, three miles from north to south, similar to the fiords of Norway.

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beach; and, though our boat carried a large sail, we did not arrive at Maniquarez before night.

We prolonged our stay at Cumana only a fortnight. Having lost all hope of the arrival of a packet from Corunna, we availed ourselves of an American vessel, laden at Nueva Barcelona with salt provision for the island of Cuba. We had now passed sixteen months on this coast, and in the interior of Venezuela, and on the 16th November we parted from our friends at Cumana to make the passage for the third time across the gulf of Cariaco to Nueva Barcelona. The night was cool and delicious. It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong, and in less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to sail.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Political state of the Provinces of Venezuela.-Extent of Territory.-. Population. Natural Productions.- External Trade.- Communications between the different Provinces comprising the Republic of Columbia.

BEFORE I quit the coasts of Terra Firma, and draw the attention of the reader to the political importance of Cuba, the largest of the West India Islands, I will collect into one point of view all those facts which may lead to a just appreciation of the future relations of commercial Europe with the united Provinces of Venezuela. When, soon after my return to Germany, I published the "Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle-Espagne," I at the same time made known some of the facts I had collected in relation to the territorial riches of South America. This comparative view of the population, agriculture, and commerce of all the Spanish colonies was formed at a period when the progress of civilization was restrained by the imperfection of social institutions, the prohibitory system, and other fatal errors in the science of government. Since the time when I developed the im

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mense resources which the people of both North and South America might derive from their own position and their relations with commercial Europe and Asia, one of those great revolutions which from time to time agitate the human race, has changed the state of society in the vast regions through which I travelled. The continental part of the New World is at present in some sort divided between three nations of European origin; one (and that the most powerful) is of Germanic race: the two others belong by their language, their literature, and their manners to Latin Europe. Those parts of the old world which advance farthest westward, the Spanish Peninsula and the British Islands, are those of which the colonies are most extensive; but four thousand leagues of coast, inhabited solely by the descendants of Spaniards and Portuguese, attest the superiority which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the peninsular nations had acquired, by their maritime expeditions, over the navigators of other countries. It may be fairly asserted that their languages, which prevail from California to the Rio de la Plata, and along the back of the Cordilleras, as well as in the forests of the Amazon, are monuments of national glory that will survive every political revolution.

The inhabitants of Spanish and Portuguese America form together a population twice as numerous as the inhabitants of English race. The French, Dutch, and Danish possessions of the new continent are of small extent; but, to complete the general view of the nations which may influence the destiny of the other hemisphere, we ought not to forget the colonists of Scandinavian origin, who are endeavouring to form settlements from the peninsula of Alashka as far as California; and the free Africans of Hayti, who have verified the prediction made by the Milanese traveller Benzoni in 1545. The situation of these Africans in an island more than three times the size of Sicily, in the middle of the West Indian Mediterranean, augments their political importance. Every friend of humanity prays for the development of the civilization which is advancing in so calm and unexpected a manner. As yet Russian America is less like an agricultural colony than the factories established by Europeans on the coast of Africa, to the great misfortune of the natives; they contain only military posts, stations of fishermen, and

Siberian hunters. It is a curious phenomenon to find the rites of the Greek Church established in one part of America, and to see two nations which inhabit the eastern and western extremities of Europe (the Russians and the Spaniards) thus bordering on each other on a continent on which they arrived by opposite routes; but the almost savage state of the unpeopled coasts of Ochotsk and Kamtschatka, the want of resources furnished by the ports of Asia, and the barbarous system hitherto adopted in the Scandinavian colonies of the New World, are circumstances which will hold them long in infancy. Hence it follows, that if in the researches of political economy we are accustomed to survey masses only, we cannot but admit that the American continent is divided, properly speaking, between three great nations of English, Spanish, and Portuguese race. The first of these three nations, the Anglo-Americans, is, next to the English of Europe, that whose flag waves over the greatest extent of sea. Without any distant colonies, its commerce has acquired a growth attained in the old world by that nation alone which communicated to North America its language, its literature, its love of labour, its predilection for liberty, and a portion of its civil institutions.

The English and Portuguese colonists have peopled only the coasts which lie opposite to Europe; the Castilians, on the contrary, in the earliest period of the conquest, crossed the chain of the Andes, and made settlements in the most western regions. There only, at Mexico, Cundinamarca, Quito, and Peru, they found traces of ancient civilization, agricultural nations, and flourishing empires. This circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth, and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America. In the East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes, or hunters. Far from forming a portion of the agricultural and laborious population, as on the table land of Anahuac, at Guatimala, and in Upper Peru, they generally withdrew at the approach of the whites.

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The necessity of labour, the preference given to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, indigo, and cotton, the cupidity which often accompanies and degrades industry, gave birth to that infamous slave-trade, the consequences of which have been alike fatal to the old and the new world. Happily, in the continental part of Spanish America, the number of African slaves is so inconsiderable, that, compared with the slave population of Brazil, or with that of the southern part of the United States, it is found to be in the proportion of one to fourteen. The whole of the Spanish colonies, without excluding the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, have not, over a surface which exceeds at least by one-fifth that of Europe, as many negroes as the single state of Virginia. The Spanish Americans, in the union of New Spain and Guatimala, present an example, unique in the torrid zone, viz., a nation of eight millions of inhahitants governed conformably with European institutions and laws, cultivating sugar, cacao, wheat, and grapes, and having scarcely a slave brought from Africa.

The population of the New Continent as yet surpasses but little that of France or Germany. It doubles in the United States in twenty-three or twenty-five years; and at Mexico, even under the government of the mother country, it doubles in forty or forty-five years. Without indulging too flattering hopes of the future, it may be admitted, that in less than a century and a half the population of America will equal that of Europe. This noble rivalry in civilization, and the arts of industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the old continent, as has often been supposed it might at the expense of the new one, will augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labour, and the activity of exchange. Doubtless, in consequence of the great revolutions which human society undergoes, the public fortune, the common patrimony of civilization, is found differently divided among the nations of the old and the new world but by degrees the equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other part of our planet as a calamity to Europe. The independence of the colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce tends