262 The Andes and the Amazon. 



cation are improving. There are several seminaries in 

 Para, of which the chief is the Lyceo da Cajpital. Too 

 many yoiiths, however, as in Quito, are satisfied with a lit- 

 tle rhetoric and law. The city supports four newspa- 

 pers. 



Paraenses may well be proud of their delightful climate. 

 Wallace says the thermometer ranges from 74° to 87° ; our 

 observation made the mean annual temperature 80.2°. The 

 mean daily temperature does not vary more than two or 

 three degrees. The climate is more equable than that of 

 any other observed part of the New World.* The great- 

 est heat is reached at two o'clock, but it is never so oppres- 

 sive as in New York. The greater the heat, the stronger 

 the sea-breeze ; and in three hundred out of three hundred 

 and sixty-five days, the air is farther cooled by an afternoon 

 shower. The rainiest month is April ; the dryest, October or 

 November. Lying in the delta of a great river, in the mid- 

 dle of the tropics, and half surrounded by swamps, its salu- 

 brity is remarkable. We readily excuse tlie proverb, " Quern 

 vaipara Para jpara)'' (" He who goes to Para stops there") ; 

 and we might have made it good, had we not been tempt- 

 ed by the magnificent steamer " South America," which 

 came up from Rio on the way to New York. On the 

 moonlit night of the 7th of January, when the ice-king 

 had thrown his white robes over the North, we turned our 

 backs upon the glimmering lights of Para, and noiselessly 

 as a canoe glided down the great river. As the sun rose 

 for the last time to us upon the land of perpetual verdure, 

 our gallant ship was plowing the mottled waters on the 

 edge of the ocean — mingled yellow patches of the Amazon 



* " The traveler, in going from the equator toward the tropics, is less struck 

 by the decrease of the mean annual temperature than by the unequal distri- 

 bution of heat in different parts of the year. " — Humboldt. The great Ger- 

 man fixes the mean temperature of the equator at 81.5°; Brewster, at 82.8° ; 

 Kirwan, 83.9°; Atkinson, 84.5°. 



