342 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 
ishment for all, and others so empty that there are none to 
gather the harvest. We long to see a vigorous emigra- 
tion pour into this region so favored by Nature, so bare of 
inhabitants. But things go slowly in these latitudes ; 
great cities do not spring up in half a century, as with us. 
Humboldt, in his account of his South-American journey, 
writes : " Since my departure from the banks of the Orinoco 
and the Amazon, a new era has unfolded itself in the social 
state of the nations of the West. The fury of civil dis- 
sensions has been succeeded by the blessings of peace, and 
a freer development of the arts of industry. The bifurca- 
tions of the Orinoco, the isthmus of Tuamini, so easy to 
be made passable by an artificial canal, will erelong fix 
the attention of commercial Europe. The Cassiquiare, as 
broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred 
and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a 
navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have 
a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square 
leagues. The grain of New Granada will be carried to 
the banks of the Rio Negro ; boats will descend from the 
sources of the Napo and the Ucuyale, from the Andes of 
Quito and of Upper Peru, to the mouths of the Orinoco, 
a distance which equals that from Timbuctoo to Marseilles." 
Such were the anticipations of Humboldt more than sixty 
years ago ; and at this day the banks of the Rio Negro 
and the Cassiquiare are still as luxuriant and as desolate, 
as fertile and as uninhabited, as they were then. 
January 8th. Manaos. The necessity for some days of 
rest, after so many months of unintermitted work, has 
detained Mr. Agassiz here for a week. It has given us 
an opportunity of renewing our walks in the neighbor- 
hood of Manaos, of completing our collection of plants, 
