The Travels and Researches of Alexander Von Humboldt: Being a Condensed Narrative of His Journeys in the Equinoctial Regions of America, and in Asiatic Russia : Together with Analysis of His More Important Investigations

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Oliver & Boyd, 1833 - 424 páginas

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Página 170 - In -less than five minutes two horses were drowned. The eel, being five feet long, and pressing itself against the belly of the horses, makes a discharge along the whole extent of its electric organ. It attacks at once the heart, the intestines, and the plexus cui'tttrus of the abdominal nerves.
Página 169 - ... which they had been scouring for wild horses and mules. They brought about thirty with them, which they forced to enter the pool. The extraordinary noise caused by the horses' hoofs makes the fish issue from the mud, and excites them to combat.
Página 137 - ... a tremendous subterraneous noise was heard, resembling the rolling of thunder, but louder, and of longer continuance, than that heard within the tropics in time of storms. This noise preceded a perpendicular motion of three or four seconds, followed by an undulatory movement somewhat longer. The shocks were in opposite directions, from north to south, and from east to west. Nothing could resist the movement from beneath upward, and undulations crossing each other.
Página 61 - A river, the temperature of which, in the season of the floods, descends as low as twenty-two degrees, when the air is at thirty and thirty-three degrees, is an inestimable benefit in a country where the...
Página 191 - ... could be accessible only by constructing very lofty scaffolds. When the natives are asked how those figures could have been sculptured, they answer with a smile, as relating a fact of which a stranger, a white man only, could be ignorant, that " at the period of the great waters, their fathers went to that height in boats.
Página 156 - ... shower moistens its foliage. Its branches appear dead and dried, but when the trunk is pierced, there flows from it a sweet and nourishing milk. It is at the rising of the sun, that this vegetable fountain is most abundant. The blacks and natives are then seen hastening from all quarters, furnished with large bowls to receive the milk, which grows yellow, and thickens at its surface. Some empty their bowls under the tree itself, others carry the juice home to their children.
Página 170 - ... storm by which they are overtaken. They are driven back by the Indians into the middle of the water; but a small number succeed in eluding the active vigilance of the fishermen. These regain the shore, stumbling at every step, and stretch themselves on the sand, exhausted with fatigue, and their limbs benumbed by the electric shocks of the gymnoti.
Página 169 - The extraordinary noise caused by the horses' hoofs, makes the fish issue from the mud, and excites them to combat. These yellowish and livid eels, resembling large aquatic serpents, swim on the surface of the water, and crowd under the bellies of the horses and mules. A contest between animals of so different an organization, furnishes a very striking spectacle.

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