NATURE 



529 



THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 1S87 



A NATURALIST IN SOUTH AMERICA 

 Notes of a Naturalist in South America. By John Ball, 

 F.R.S., M.R.I. A., &c. (London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 

 and Co., 1SS7.) 



I. 



BY this unpretending little volume its author has opened 

 up to view a new avenue to knowledge— a royal 

 road, in short, to anyone as competent as he has shown 

 himself to be to take advantage of all that it offers to 

 an intelligent traveller with his eyes and ears open. Its 

 contents are a rich collection of facts and thoughts, 

 chiefly botanical, meteorological, and geographical, ac- 

 quired during a five months' voyage over 18,400 miles of 

 ocean, and embracing 100' of latitude, during which the 

 author passed only seventy days on dry land ; and they 

 are laid before the reader in a style which is as attractive 

 as instructive. 



In the preface Mr. Ball says of his voyage : — " A tour 

 round the South American continent, which was com- 

 pleted in so short a time as five months, may not appear 

 to deserve any special record ; yet I am led to hope that 

 this little book may induce others to visit a region so 

 abounding in sources of enjoyment and interest. There 

 is no part of the world where a traveller can view so 

 many varied and impressive aspects of Nature, whilst he 

 whose attention is mainly given to the progress and 

 development of the social condition of mankind will find 

 in the condition of the numerous States of the continent, 

 and the manners and habits of the many different races 

 that inhabit it, abundant material to engage his attention 

 and excite his interest." Mr. Ball adds that, though the 

 aim of his journey was mainly to see Nature in aspects 

 new to him, he, as an unprejudiced visitor, gives also his 

 impressions as to the social and political condition of the 

 different regions which he visited. With these impressions 

 we need not concern ourselves, though we may say that 

 they seem to us to be both just and liberal. 



Leaving England in March 1882 as a passenger on 

 board a West Indian mail-steamer, Mr. Ball found that 

 the passage across the Atlantic offered nothing of unusual 

 interest, but even this well-beaten track suggests some good 

 ideas as to rate of flow of the upper and lower strata of the 

 aitrial currents forming the trade-winds. Barbados was 

 made in thirteen days, where, amongst other vegetable 

 treasures, he obtained the fruits of the sandbox-tree {Hura 

 crepitans), the explosive nature of which is well known, 

 though not the violence of its character, which would sug- 

 gest an alternative name of the dynamite-tree. Mr. Ball 

 carried away a specimen packed in a wooden box, which 

 he subsequently placed in his herbarium room in London, 

 where, nine months after it had been obtained, it burst 

 with such violence that the box was broken to pieces, and 

 the valves and seeds of the fruit were scattered all about 

 the room. 



A single day at Jamaica afforded him his first glimpse 

 of a thoroughly tropical vegetation in situ, and it would 

 be difficult to find a terser or better description of its 

 appearance to a Londoner than his simple statement that 

 " it seemed to me as if the inmates of the Palm House at 

 Vol. XXXV. — No. 910 



Kew had broken loose and run scrambling up the rocky 

 hills." 



The Isthmus of Panama crossed and the Pacific 

 reached, the real interest of the voyage begins. The first 

 impression Mr. Ball gains— suggested by the breadth of 

 the Bay of Panama (120 sea' miles across)— is of the 

 vastness of the geographical features of America as com- 

 pared with the ideas formed of them from experience of 

 "our diminutive European continent," and from maps, 

 and especially from those on Mercator's projection. 

 In respect of this last he not inaptly complains that it 

 profits nothing to explain, even to the most intelligent 

 youth, the nature and amount of the errors involved in 

 that mode of representing a spherical surface on a plane ; 

 and he goes on to say : " I verily believe that all the 

 mischief done by the stupidity, ignorance, and perversity 

 of the writers of bad school-books, is trifling compared 

 to the amount of false ideas spread through the world by 

 the production of that respectable Fleming." 



A few hours botanising in the coast forests of Buen- 

 aventura, a port on the coast of Columbia, yielded a 

 harvest of plants which forged the first link in a chain of 

 reasoning that has led Mr. Ball to the conclusion 

 (opposed to the view of all other writers on the same sub- 

 ject) that the most marked division of the flora of tropical 

 South America is not that between the regions east 

 and west of the Andes ; for on his arrival in Brazil he 

 found that, though he was nearly 3000 miles from Buen- 

 aventura, and separated from it by the great barrier of the 

 Andes, the plants of the forests of that country were 

 almost all nearly allied to Brazilian forms. This is followed 

 by a bold speculation, dsvelt on at greater length towards 

 the conclusion of the work, that " the ancestors of the 

 Brazilian flora, and to a large extent also those of the 

 Andean flora, came into existence in the ancient high 

 mountain ranges of Brazil, where we now see, in the vast 

 extent of arenaceous rocks, and in the surviving pinnacles 

 of granite, the ruins of one of the greatest mountain 

 regions of the earth." 



Crossing the equator, our naturalist was disappointed 

 in not seeing Chimborazo, still in popular, estimation 

 the " hub " of the South American continent, though geo- 

 graphers have long known that it has to bow its head to 

 Aconcagua, upwards of 2500 miles further south. Chim- 

 borazo is only seventy miles from Guayaquil, whence it 

 is easily seen on clear days, but we are told these occur 

 only about half a dozen times in the year ! 



Cape Blanco, the westernmost cape of South America, 

 rounded, the so-called rainless zone of South America, 

 which extends for nearly 2000 miles to the southward, 

 is reached. This is a feature of the highest interest to 

 the biologist and meteorologist. Its access was signalled 

 by the sudden fall of temperature from an average of 80°, 

 with a relaxing atmosphere " heavily charged with 

 vapour,"- to 74^, with an elasticity in the air that 

 dispelled a previous lassitude, which had rendered burden- 

 some even the first taste of the charms of tropical sceneiy. 



In no part of the world is a change in vegetation more 

 suddenly effected than in the short distance, amounting 

 to little over 100 miles, between the Gulf of Guayaquil and 



^ Surely an oversight for English miles. 



- When shall we have accurate conceptions embodied in our colloquial 

 phraseology? The vapour of water is lighter than atmospheric air, yet the 

 latter is conventionally described as '' heavily laden " with it. 



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