214 A SKETCH OF 



this idea is sufficient to serve us as a guiding star through 

 the countless forms of Nature. With the feeling that, 

 where we cannot explain by law, where we cannot decide 

 from the purpose, yet, at least, the inexplicable existence of 

 Beauty may suffice to interpret in mysterious fashion the 

 symbols of Nature let us leave the forests of Guiana, the 

 last mat-roof of the Guaranese between the trunks of the 

 Mauritius Palm, and enter the Pampas of Venezuela, of 

 which Humboldt has sketched such a clever and vivid 

 picture. No smiling verdure clothes the glowing rock-soil 

 here ; here and there in its crevices the Melocactus displays 

 its round balls, " horrid " with threatening thorns. Ascend 

 we thence the Andes ; instead of tender grass, the earth is 

 covered with pale, grey-green globes of spiny Mammillarias, 

 while, intermingled, rises the serious and mournful old-man 

 Cactus, with its venerable-looking long gray hair. Borne 

 on the wings of fancy further north, we descend into the 

 plains of Mexico, where the gigantic fragments of the city 

 of the Aztecs, a product of a solitary era of civilization 

 long lost to history, display themselves ; the landscape 

 spreads out before us as the bare and naked Tierra 

 calient e, parched by the glowing sun ; of a dull green hue, 

 without a branch or leaf, the angled columns of the Torch- 

 thistles rise twenty or thirty feet high, hemmed in with an 

 impenetrable thicket of irritably pricking Indian Figs, 

 while round about appear the strangest, ugliest forms, in 

 the groups of the Echinocacti and little Cerei, between 

 which creeps snake-like, or as some great poisonous reptile, 

 the long, dry stem of the great-flowered Cactus (Cereus 

 nycticallus). In short, one family accompanies us through 

 all our wanderings, that of the Cactus Plants, which seems 

 in all its wondrous forms to withdraw itself entirely from 

 the principle of Beauty, and yet at the same time presses 



