FTTEVA BABCELONA. 91 



pasturage with horses and mules. No sheep or goats are 

 found on these immense plains. Sheep do not thrive well in 

 equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand 

 toises high, where their fleece is long, and sometimes very 

 fine. In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves 

 give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, desti- 

 tute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, 

 cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers. 



We arrived on the 15th of July at the Eundacion, or 

 Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably 

 for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and An- 

 gostura. Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao. Alcedo, 

 La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mis- 

 taken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Bar- 

 celona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del 

 Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Yalle del Pao de 

 Zarate. Though the weather was cloudy, I succeeded in 

 obtaining some heights of a Centauri, serving to determine 

 the latitude of the place ; which is 8 37' 57". Some alti- 

 tudes of the sun gave me 67 8' 12" for the longitude, sup- 

 posing Angostura to be 06 15' 21". The astronomical 

 determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are 

 very important to the geography of this country, where, 

 in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether 

 wanting. Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao : 

 they are rarely seen in the Llanos. We even found some 

 cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding 

 the great distance of the sea. I was the more struck with 

 this fact, because doubts have recently been started respect- 

 ing the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have 

 seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Tim- 

 buctoo, in the centre of Africa. We several times saw 

 cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the 

 Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the 



Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us 

 from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona. As we 

 advanced, the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, 

 and the atmosphere more hot. The heat from which we 

 Bum-red is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, 

 but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it ; this sand 



