IN AMERICA. A405 
edition has also been published under the title of 
Voyage aux Régions Equinoxiales du Nouveau 
Continent, pendant les années 1799, 1800, 1801, 
1802, 1803, ef 1804. The translation of this work 
by Mrs Williams is familiar to the English reader. 
The labour necessary for reducing the observa- 
tions made by our travellers to a condition fit for 
the public eye must have been very great; yet, pos- 
sessed of a mind not less characterized by activity | 
than the vastness of its acquirements, Humboldt in 
the mean while engaged in various investigations, 
which he has partly published in the foreign jour- 
nals. In concert with M. Gay Lussac, with whom 
he lived for several years in the most intimate 
friendship, he has made numerous magnetic ex- 
periments, and verified Biot’s theory respecting the 
position of the magnetic equator. They have found 
that the great mountain-chains, and even the active 
volcanoes, have no appreciable influence on the mag- 
netic power; and have established the fact, that it 
- gradually diminishes as we recede from the equator. 
On the return of the philosophers from America, 
Bonpland was appointed by Bonaparte to the office 
of superintending the gardens at Malmaison, where 
the Empress Josephine, who was passionately fond 
_ of flowers, had formed a splendid collection of exo- 
tics. His amiable disposition, not less than his ac- 
quirements, procured for him the esteem of all who 
knew him. In 1818 he went to Buenos Ayres as 
Professor of Natural History. In 1820 he under- 
took an excursion to the interior of Paraguay ; but 
when he arrived at St Anne on the eastern bank 
of the Parana, where he had established a colony 
of Indians, he was unexpectedly surrounded by a 
