xxxvii 



Europe from the North Cape in Lapland, 

 and with whom I had the happiness of 

 beginning my earliest studies at the school 

 of Freiberg, I have been enabled to extend 

 the plan of a work intended to throw some 

 light on the construction of the Globe, 

 and on the relative antiquity of it's forma- 

 tion. 



After having distributed into separate 

 works all that belongs to astronomy, bo- 

 tany, zoology, the political description of 

 New Spain, and the history of the ancient 

 civilization of certain nations of the New 

 Continent, there still remained a great num- 

 ber of general results and local descriptions, 

 which I might have collected into separate 

 treatises. I had prepared several during 

 my journey ; on the races of men in South 

 America ; on the missions of the Oroonoko ; 

 on the obstacles to the progress of society 

 in the torrid zone, from the climate, and 

 the strength of vegetation : the character 

 of the landscape in the Cordilleras of the 

 Andes, compared with that of the Alps in 

 Switzerland ; the analogies between the 

 rocks of the two hemispheres ; on the phy- 

 sical constitution of the air in the equinoctial 



