COSMOS. 



befaria, weaves a purple girdle round the spiry peaks. In 

 the cold regions of the Paramos, which is continually exposed 

 to the fury of storms and winds, we find that flowering shrubs 

 and herbaceous plants, bearing large and variegated blossoms, 

 have given place to monocotyledons, whose slender spikes 

 constitute the sole covering of the soil. This is the zone of 

 the grasses, one vast savannah extending over the immense 

 mountain plateaux, and reflecting a yellow, almost golden 

 tinge, to the slopes of the Cordilleras, on which graze the 

 lama and the cattle domesticated by the European colonist. 

 Where the naked trachyte rock pierces the grassy turf and 

 penetrates into those higher strata of air which are supposed 

 to be less charged with carbonic acid, we meet only with 

 plants of an inferior organisation, as lichens, lecideas, and 

 the brightly-coloured dustlike lepraria, scattered around in 

 circular patches. Islets of fresh-fallen snow, varying in form 

 and extent, arrest the last feeble traces of vegetable develop- 

 ment, and to these succeeds the region of perpetual snow, 

 whose elevation undergoes but little change, and may be 

 easily determined. It is but rarely that the elastic forces at 

 work within the interior of our globe, have succeeded in 

 breaking through the spiral domes, which, resplendent in the 

 brightness of eternal snow, crown the summits of the Cordil- 

 leras and even where these subterranean forces have opened 

 a permanent communication with the atmosphere, through 

 circular craters or long fissures, they rarely send forth cur- 

 rents of lava, but merely eject ignited scorias, steam, sulphu- 

 retted hydrogen gas, and jets of carbonic acid. 



In the earliest stages of civilisation the grand and imposing 

 spectacle presented to the minds of the inhabitants of the 

 tropics could only awaken feelings of astonishment and awe. 

 It might perhaps be supposed, as we have already said, that 

 the periodical return of the same phenomena, and the uniform 

 manner in which they arrange themselves in successive 

 groups, would have enabled man more readily to attain to a 

 knowledge of the laws of nature ; but as far as tradition and 

 history guide us, we do not find that any application was 

 made of the advantages presented by these favoured regions. 

 Recent researches have rendered it very doubtful whether 

 the primitive seat of Hindoo civilisation one of the most 

 remarkable phases in the progress of mankind was actually 



