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In 1743 La Condamine, after having measured an arc of the meridian at the equator, left his companions Bouguer and Godin des Odonais, embarked on the Chinchipe, descended it to its junction with the Maranon, reached the mouth at Napo on the 31st of July, just in time to observe an emersion of the first satellite of Jupiter which allowed this "Humboldt of the eighteenth century" to accurately determine the latitude and longitude of the spot visited the villages on both banks, and on the 6th of September arrived in front of the fort of Para.
"What is the fact?" asked Ned Land. "This is it. In 1861, to the north-east of Teneriffe, very nearly in the same latitude we are in now, the crew of the despatch-boat Alector perceived a monstrous cuttlefish swimming in the waters. Captain Bouguer went near to the animal, and attacked it with harpoon and guns, without much success, for balls and harpoons glided over the soft flesh.
To what action of light is this phenomenon due? Bouguer is of opinion that it must be attributed to the passage of light through icy particles. Such, also, is the opinion of De Saussure, Scoresby, and other meteorologists. In regard to the mountains, as we cannot assure ourselves directly of the fact by entering the clouds, we are reduced to conjecture.
We thought, at first sight, that these luminous points, which floated in the air, indicated some new eruption of the great volcano of Lancerota; for we recollected that Bouguer and La Condamine, in scaling the volcano of Pichincha, were witnesses of the eruption of Cotopaxi.
Thus, a horizontal bed of rock forms a table mountain, or such as M. Bouguer found in the valley of the Madelena.
"It is the history of a Frenchwoman whose sorrows rendered these banks memorable in the eighteenth century." "We are listening," said Minha. "Here goes, then," said Manoel. "In 1741, at the time of the expedition of the two Frenchmen, Bouguer and La Condamine, who were sent to measure a terrestrial degree on the equator, they were accompanied by a very distinguished astronomer, Godin des Odonais.
There are but two ways in which those appearances may be explained; one of these is that which M. Bouguer has adopted; the other, again, belongs to the present Theory, which represents the action of running water upon the surface of the earth as instrumental in producing its particular forms, and thus forming many natural appearances upon the surface of the earth. The first of these, viz. that a mass of solid land, in such a shape as that here described, should remain while all around it sinks, is an opinion which, however possible it may be, is not supported, I believe, by any example in nature; the last again, viz. that the parts around those insulated masses, and those that had intervened between the corresponding mountains, have been carried away by the natural operation of the rivers, is not only the most easy to conceive, but is also, so far as those operations are concerned, conform to every appearance upon the surface of the globe. It is not necessary to go to South America, and the rivers of the Cordeliers, for examples to illustrate that which every one may see performed almost at his own door; but it is there that an example has occurred, which, though it has imposed upon an eminent philosopher, cannot properly be employed in support of any other theory but the present. Our author proceeds: «Je ne connois les environs de l'Orénoque que par relation, mais je sçais qu'en plusieurs endroits les montagnes y sont également formées de couches horizontales, et qu'elles ont souvent en haut des plateformes qui sont exactement de niveau. On ne trouve
On our maps this structure is indicated but imperfectly; and what La Condamine and Bouguer merely guessed, during their long visit to the table-land of Quito, has been generalized and ill-interpreted by those who have described the whole chain according to the type of the equatorial Andes.
It is in the valley of the Madelena that M. Bouguer found those grand relicts of the wasted strata; but we are now to take a view of a country situated high above the level of that valley.
Fixed to a piece of madrepore, this seaweed vegetates at the bottom of the ocean, at the depth of 192 feet, notwithstanding which we found its leaves as green as those of our grasses. According to the experiments of Bouguer, light is weakened after a passage of 180 feet in the ratio of 1 to 1477.8.
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