222 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 
1796, had again become shoals dangerous to navigation. Ca- 
brera, a tongue of land on the north side of the valley, was so 
narrow that the least rise of the water completely inundated 
it. A protracted north wind sufficed to flood the road between 
Maracay and New Valencia. The fears which the inhabitants 
of the shores had so long entertained were reversed. Those 
who had explained the diminution of the lake by the suppo- 
sition of subterranean channels were suspected of blocking 
them up, to prove themselves in the right. 
During the twenty-two years which had elapsed, the valley 
of Aragua had been the theatre of bloody struggles, and war 
had desolated these smiling lands and decimated their popula- 
tion. At the first cry of independence a great number of 
slaves found their liberty by enlisting under the banners of 
the new republic; the great plantations were abandoned, and 
the forest, which in the tropics so rapidly encroaches, had soon 
recovered a large proportion of the soil which man had 
wrested from it by more than a century of constant and pain- 
ful labor. 
Boussingault proceeds to state that two lakes near Ubate, 
in New Granada, had formed but one, a century before his 
visit; that the waters were gradually retiring, and the plan- 
tations extending over the abandoned bed; that, by inquiry of 
old hunters and by examination of parish records, he found that 
extensive clearings had been made and were still going on. 
He found, also, that the length of the Lake of Fuquené, in 
the same valley, had, within two centuries, been reduced from 
ten leagues to one and a half, its breadth from three leagues to 
one. At the former period, the neighboring mountains were 
well wooded, but at the time of his visit the mountains had 
been almost entirely stripped of their wood. Our author adds 
that other cases, similar to those already detailed, might be 
cited, and he proceeds to show, by several examples, that the 
waters of other lakes in the same regions, where the valleys 
had always been bare of wood, or where the forests had not 
been disturbed, had undergone no change of level. 
