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The Guacharos alone would have been sufficient to render it celebrated. These nocturnal birds have been nowhere yet discovered except in the mountains of Caripe and Cumanacoa. But his account of Caripe was fully corroborated by my host, who had gone there last year, and, by the help of the magnesium light, had penetrated farther into the cave than either the bishop or Humboldt.
But that coast appeared to me to be wholly calcareous; and I cannot conceive where could be the situation of ampelite and native alum on this point. Was it in the beds of slaty clay that alternate with the alpine limestone of Cumanacoa? South America at present receives its alum from Europe, as Europe in its turn received it from the natives of Asia previous to the fifteenth century.
Our guides and the farmer, an intelligent man, equally acquainted with the localities of the province, discussed, in the manner of the Creoles, the dangers to which the town of Cumanacoa would be exposed if the Cuchivano became an active volcano, or, as they expressed it, "se veniesse a reventar."
These last have the cellular tissue very much extended, and they contain more water, more albumen and less of that acrid, volatile principle, which is but little soluble in water, and in which the stimulant property of tobacco seems to reside. At Cumanacoa the tobacco, after being gathered, undergoes a preparation which the Spaniards call cura seca.
During my stay in America I took the limestone of Cumanacoa for zechstein or Alpine limestone, and that of Caripe for Jura limestone. There is in Venezuela a suppression of the different strata which, in the old continent, separate zechstein from Jura limestone.
These pretended thigh-bones of giants were carried to the port of Cumana, where I sought for them in vain; but from the analogy of some fossil bones which I brought from other parts of South America, and which have been carefully examined by M. Cuvier, it is probable that the gigantic femoral bones of Cumanacoa belonged to elephants of a species now extinct. Jefferson.
The decrement of the heat being nearly the same within the tropics, and during the summer under the temperate zone, the small difference of level of one hundred toises should produce only a change in the mean temperature of 1 or 1.5 degrees. But we shall soon find that at Cumanacoa the difference rises to more than four degrees.
Petroleum-spring in the same gulf, near Maniquarez. It issues from mica-slate. Flames issuing from the earth, near Cumana, on the banks of the Manzanares, and at Mariguitar, on the southern coast of the gulf of Cariaco, at the time of the great earthquake of 1797. Igneous phenomena of the mountain of Cuchivano, near Cumanacoa.
These layers have the same direction and the same inclination as the mica-slate of Araya. Where the flank of the limestone mountains of New Andalusia is very steep we observe, as at Achsenberg, near Altdorf in Switzerland, layers that are singularly arched or turned. The tints of the limestone of Cumanacoa vary from darkish grey to bluish white and sometimes pass from compact to granular.
In the latter case its presence seems to prove still more clearly that the limestones of Cumanacoa and Caripe are only two parts of the same system, alternating with sandstone, sometimes quartzose, sometimes slaty.
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