SCIENCE AND LITEKATUEB 59 



produces effects analogous to ttose produced by the 

 cold of our northern winters. The trees lose their 

 leaves, the snakes and crocodiles and other reptiles 

 bury themselves in the mud, and many phases of 

 life, both animal and vegetable, are wrapped in a 

 long sleep. This is not strictly scientific knowledge; 

 it is knowledge that lies upon the surface, and that 

 any eye and mind may gather. One feels inclined 

 to skip the elaborate account of the physical fea- 

 tures of the lake of Valencia and its surroundings, 

 but the old Mestizo Indian who gave the travelers 

 goat's milk, and who, with his beautiful daughter, 

 lived on a little island in its midst, awakens lively 

 curiosity. He guarded his daughter as a miser 

 guards his treasure. When some hunters by chance 

 passed a night on his island, he suspected some de- 

 signs upon his girl, and he obliged her to climb up 

 a very lofty acacia-tree, which grew in the plain at 

 some distance from the hut, while he stretched him- 

 self at the foot of the tree, and would not permit 

 her to descend till the young men had departed. 

 Thus, throughout the work, when the scientific in- 

 terest is paramount, the literary and human interest 

 fail, and vice versa. 



No man of letters was ever more hospitable to 

 science than Goethe; indeed, some of the leading 

 ideas of modem science were distinctly foreshad- 

 owed by him; yet they took the form and texture 

 of literature, or of sentiment, rather than of exact 

 science. They were the reaohings forth of his spirit ; 

 his grasping for the ideal clews to nature, rather 



