342 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 



isbment 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 Sth. 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, 



