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pled plains, filled with herds, furnish them with booty. They commit their depredations on horseback, in the manner of the Bedouins. The insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results, but that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of the prisoners. It also frequently happens that sentences of death, tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for want of a hangman. In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others. Our guides related to us, that, a short time before our arrival on the coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners, determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner. The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus saving his life, he called again for his irons, which had been struck off. He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains, recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice, in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that he himself deserved.

If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors, who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord, during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions! Our European wastes and heaths are but a feeble image of the savannahs of the New Continent, which, for the space of eight or ten thousand square leagues are smooth as the surface of the sea. The immensity of their extent insures impunity to robbers, who conceal themselves more effectually in the savannahs than in our mountains and forests; and it is easy to conceive, that even a European police would not be very ef

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fective in regions where there are travellers and no roads, herds and no herdsmen, and farms so solitary, that notwithstanding the powerful action of the mirage, a journey of several days may be made without seeing one appear within the horizon.

Whilst traversing the Llanos of Caracas, New Barcelona, and Cumana, which succeed each other from west to east, from the snowy mountains of Merida to the Delta of the Orinoco, we feel anxious to know whether these vast tracts of land are destined by nature to serve eternally for pasture, or whether they will at some future time be subject to the plough and the spade. This question is the more important, as the Llanos, situated at the two extremities of South America, are obstacles to the political union of the provinces they separate. They prevent the agriculture of the coast of Venezuela from extending towards Guiana, and they impede that of Potosi from advancing in the direction of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. The intermediate Llanos preserve, together with pastoral life, somewhat of a rude and wild character, which separates and keeps them remote from the civilization of countries anciently cultivated. Thus it has happened that in the war of independence, they have been the scene of struggle between the hostile parties; and that the inhabitants of Calabozo have almost seen the fate of the confederate provinces of Venezuela and Cundinamarca decided before their walls. In assigning limits to the new states, and to their subdivisions, it is to be hoped there may not be cause hereafter to repent having lost sight of the importance of the Llanos, and the influence they may have on the disunion of communities which important common interests should bring together. These plains would serve as natural boundaries like the seas, or the virgin forests of the tropics, were it not that armies can cross them with greater facility, as their innumerable troops of horses and mules, and herds of oxen, furnish every means of conveyance and subsistence.

What we have seen of the power of man struggling against the force of nature in Gaul, in Germany, and re cently (but still beyond the tropics), in the United States, scarcely affords any just measure of what we may expect from the progress of civilization in the torrid zone. Forests

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BARRENNESS OF THE LLANOS.

disappear but very slowly by fire and the axe, when the trunks of trees are from eight to ten feet in diameter; when in falling they rest one upon another, and the wood, moistened by almost continual rains, is excessively hard. The planters who inhabit the Llanos or Pampas, do not generally admit the possibility of subjecting the soil to cultivation; it is a problem not yet solved. Most of the savannahs of Venezuela have not the same advantage as those of North America. The latter are traversed longitudinally by three great rivers, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red River of Nachitoches; the savannahs of Araura, Calabozo, and Pao, are crossed in a transverse direction only by the tributary streams of the Orinoco, the most westerly of which (the Cari, the Pao, the Acaru, and the Manapire) have very little water in the season of drought. These streams scarcely flow at all toward the north; so that in the centre of the Llanos, there remain vast tracts of land called bancos and mesas frightfully parched. The eastern parts, fertilized by the Portuguesa, the Masparro, and the Orivante, and by the tributary streams of those three rivers, are most susceptible of cultivation. The soil is sand mixed with clay, covering a bed of quartz pebbles. The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants, is everywhere extremely thin. It is scarcely augmented by the fall of the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less periodically regular than in temperate climates. During thousands of years the Llanos have been destitute of trees and brushwood; a few scattered palms in the savannah add little to that hydruret of carbon, that extractive matter, which, according to the experiments of Saussure, Davy, and Braconnot, gives fertility to the soil. The social plants, which almost exclusively predominate in the steppes, are monocotyledons; and it is known how much grasses impoverish the soil into which their fibrous roots penetrate. This action of the killingias, paspalums, and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth, this varies according as it rests The Spanish words banco and mesa signify literally bench' and table.' In the Llanos of South America, little elevations rising slightly above the general elevation of the plain are called bancos and mesas, from their supposed resemblance to benches and tables.

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on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud on the lower grounds, or as the shock of the waters carries away from the small elevations the little soil that has covered them. Many solitary cultivated spots already exist in the midst of the pastures, where running water, and tufts of the mauritia palm, have been found. These farms, sown with maize, and planted with cassava, will multiply considerably if trees and shrubs be augmented.

The aridity and excessive heat of the mesas do not depend solely on the nature of their surface, and the local reverberation of the soil; their climate is modified by the adjacent regions; by the whole of the Llano of which they form a part. In the deserts of Africa, or Arabia, in the Llanos of South America, in the vast heaths extending from the extremity of Jutland to the mouth of the Scheldt, the stability of the limits of the desert, the savannahs, and the downs, depends chiefly on their immense extent, and the nakedness these plains have acquired from some revolution destructive of the ancient vegetation of our planet. By their extent, their continuity, and their mass, they oppose the inroads of cultivation, and preserve, like inland gulfs, the stability of their boundaries. I will not enter upon the great question, whether in the Sahara, that Mediterranean of moving sands, the germs of organic life are increased in our days. In proportion as our geographical knowledge has extended, we have discovered in the eastern part of the desert islets of verdure, oases covered with date-trees, crowd together in more numerous archipelagos, and open their ports to the caravans; but we are ignorant whether the form of the oases have not remained constantly the same since the time of Herodotus. Our annals are too incomplete to enable us to follow Nature in her slow and gradual progress. From these spaces entirely bare, whence some violent catastrophe has swept away the vegetable covering and the mould; from those deserts of Syria and Africa, which, by their petrified wood, attest the changes they have undergone; let us turn to the grass-covered Llanos and to the consideration of phenomena that come nearer the circle of our daily observations. Respecting the possibility of a more general cultivation of the steppes of America, the colonists, settled there, concur in the

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opinions I have deduced from the climatic action of these steppes considered as surfaces, or continuous masses. They have observed that downs enclosed within cultivated and wooded land sooner yield to the labours of the husbandman than soils alike circumscribed, but forming part of a vast surface of the same nature. This observation is extremely just, whether in reference to soil covered with heath, as in the north of Europe; with cistuses, mastic-trees, or palmettos, as in Spain; or with cactuses, argemones, or brathys, as in equinoctial America. The more space the association occupies, the more resistance do the social plants oppose to the labourer. With this general cause others are combined in the Llanos of Venezuela; viz. the action of the small grasses which impoverish the soil; the total absence of trees and brushwood; the sandy winds, the heat of which is increased by contact with a surface absorbing the rays of the sun during twelve hours, and unshaded, except by the stalks of the aristides, chanchuses, and paspalums. The progress observable on the vegetation of large trees, and the cultivation of dicotyledonous plants in the vicinity of towns, (for instance around Calabozo and Pao) prove what may be gained upon the Llano, by attacking it in small portions, enclosing it by degrees, and dividing it by coppices and canals of irrigation. Possibly the influence of the winds, which render the soil sterile, might be diminished by sowing on a large scale, for example, over fifteen or twenty acres, the seeds of the psidium, the croton, the cassia, or the tamarind, which prefer dry, open spots. I am far from believing that the savannahs will ever disappear entirely; or that the Llanos, so useful for pasturage and the trade in cattle, will ever be cultivated like the vallies of Aragua or other parts near the coast of Caracas and Cumana: but I am persuaded, that in the lapse of ages a considerable portion of these plains, under a government favourable to industry, will lose the wild aspect which has characterized them since the first conquest by Europeans.

After three days' journey, we began to perceive the chain of the mountains of Cumana, which separates the Llanos, or, as they are often called here, "the great sea of verdure,' from the coast of the Caribbean Sea. If the Bergantin be

"Los Llanos son como un mar de yerbas"- "The Llanos are like a vast sea of grass"-is an observation often repeated in these regions.