METEOROLOGY. 219 



But how fallacious are often the most unpretending expectations of 

 nations as well as of individuals. These Indians, as a tribe or nation, 

 may have removed, or become extinct, or been driven away ; for cer- 

 tain it is that they are gone, and have vanished from this region. 

 Month after month and year after year (until amounting to centuries) 

 went silently on over the only yet remaining witnesses of their existence. 

 The luminaries of day and night had their glittering rays alternately 

 reflected from the inclined and even surfaces of these rocks ; the rain 

 ran down innumerable times as from a roof and washed the figures 

 clean. Wind and water and oxygen and beat worked slowly but 

 effectually at the destruction of the figure-furrowed surface, and suc- 

 ceeded but too well. But no one fcarae to wonder at the skill and 

 patience of their makers. Fifty or a hundred years more would have 

 done their destructive work com{)letely, and these figures would have 

 vanished and gone, probably without having been noticed even by a 

 single individual. 



Occupied with such reflections as these, when seated near the sim- 

 ple memorials just spoken of, I feel myself richly remunerated for all 

 my fatigue and the trouble to snatch them from oblivion. 



That these sculptured rocks were intended to be seen and noticed is 

 proved by the fact that they are never found in the primeval forest, 

 but most generally in some prominent part of a savannah, bordering 

 on the forest, although now overgrown with brushwood and reeds. 

 Some of the figures were found in a place partly overgrown with small 

 trees, or rather shrubs of a stunted growth, mostly of small specimens 

 of clusia, which fact may prove how slowly a dry savannah, even when 

 undisturbed by fire, is rechanged again into a forest ; while it takes 

 but a few years to change, by the aid of fire, a forest into a savannah. 



These localities show, also, clearly enough to a person acquainted 

 with the mode of agriculture in the mountainous districts that the 

 Indians have subsisted on agriculture and not on the chase, for by the 

 latter not even a dozen individuals could keep themselves alive for any 

 length of time, much less a whole tribe. 



The barometer which I carried to the region of the sculptured rocks 

 assigns to them a height of about 5,900 feet above the ocean. When 

 we consider the wet, cold, disagreeable, and foggy weather which 

 prevails during the greater part of the year in this region, where the 

 Creoles, in coming up from the warmer valleys, sometimes shiver with 

 cold, where the banana and other cultivated tropical plants seldom 

 bear fruit, and where Indian corn can only be raised with difficulty 

 or not at all, we may perhaps be inclined to think that the Indians 

 chose this cold region from predilection; and in this case might proba- 

 bly have descended from the same stock that peopled and preferred 

 the high regions of the Peruvian Andes. But when we afterwards 

 find similar rocks near the hot and sultry coast of Puerto C<bello, and 

 in other low valleys, the above inferences would have to undergo con- 

 siderable modification. 



A corn or maize-grinder is in general use amongst the Creoles of 

 Venezuela, which, considering its very rude and simple construction, 



