156 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



this acute observer of nature, " could only be collected from 

 a river having a long course; the land, therefore, which 

 supplied it must be a continent, and not an island." As, 

 according to Arrian, the companions of Alexander, when they 

 penetrated across the snow-crowned summits of Paropani- 

 sus (4), believed that they recognized in the crocodile- 

 teeming Indus a part of the Nile,* so Columbus, in his 

 ignorance of the similarity of physiognomy which charac- 

 terises all the products of the climate of palms, imagined that 

 the New Continent was the eastern coast of the far projecting 

 Asia. The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal 

 purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, 

 wafted to him by the land breeze — all led him to suppose, (as 

 we are told by Herrera, in the Decades (5),) that he was 

 approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first 

 parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers, 

 which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient 

 world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface 

 of the earth, newly adorned with plants. This poetical 

 passage in the Journal of Columbus, or rather in a letter to 

 Ferdinand and Isabella, written from Haiti in October, 1498, 

 presents a peculiar psychological interest. It teaches us 

 anew, that the creative fancy of the poet manifests itself in 

 the discoverer of a world, no less than in every other form of 

 human greatness. 



When we consider the great mass of water poured into the 

 Atlantic Ocean by the Orinoco, we are naturally led to ask 

 which of the South American rivers is the greatest — the 

 Orinoco, the Amazon, or the La Plata? The question is as 

 indeterminate as the idea of greatness itself. The Rio de la 

 Plata has undoubtedly the widest mouth, its width mea- 

 suring 92 miles across; but this river, like those of Great 

 Britain, is comparatively of but inconsiderable length. Its 

 shallowness, too, is so great as to impede navigation at 



* Hist., lib. vi., initio. 



