281 



ler, favoured like us by the hospitality of the 

 missionaries, were to remain one year on the 

 banks of the Atabapo, the Tuamini, and the 

 Rio Negro, and another year in the mountains 

 of Esmeralda and the Upper Oroonoko,he would 

 no doubt triple the number of genera described 

 by Aublet and Mr. Richard. 



The trees of the forest of Pimichin preserve 

 the gigantic height of eighty or one hundred and 

 twenty feet. In these burning climates the 

 laurinese and amyris* furnish that fine timber 

 for building, which, on the north-west coast of 

 America, on mountains where the thermometer 

 falls in winter to 20° cent, below nought, we find 

 in the family of the coniferse. Such in every 

 zone, and in all the famil ies of American plants, 

 is the prodigious force of vegetation, that, in the 

 latitude of fifty- seven degrees north, on the 

 same isothermal line with Saint Petersburgh 

 and the Orkney Islands, the pinus canadensis 

 displays trunks one hundred and fifty feet high, 

 and six feet in diameterf-. Toward night we 



* The great white and red cedars of these countries are 

 not the cedrela odorata, but the amyris altissima, which is an 

 icica of Aublet. 



t Mr. Langsdorf saw among the inhabitants of Norfolk 

 Sound boats made of one piece, fifty feet long, four feet and 

 a half broad, and three high at the sides. They contain 

 thirty persons. (Bemerk. aufeiner Reise urn die Welt, vol. ii, 

 p. 89). These boats remind us of the canoes of the Rio 



