178 
EFFECTS OF COLD. 
attention of physiologists. Bouguer relates, that when he 
reached the summit of Montague Pelee, in the island of 
Martinique, he and his companions shivered with cold, though 
the heat was above 2T5°. In reading the interesting nar- 
rative of captain Bligh, who, in consequence of a mutiny 
on board the Bounty, was forced to make a voyage of twelve 
hundred leagues in an open boat, we find that that navigator, 
in the tenth and twelfth degrees of south latitude, suffered 
Well more from cold than from hunger. During our abode 
at Guayaquil, in the month of January 1803, we observed 
that the natives covered themselves, and complained of the 
cold, when the thermometer sunk to 23'8°, whilst they felt 
the heat suffocating at 30'5°. Six or seven degrees were 
sufficient to cause the opposite sensations of cold and heat ; 
because, on these coasts of South America, the ordinary 
temperature of the atmosphere is twenty-eight degrees. 
The humidity, which modifies the conducting power of the 
air for heat, contributes greatly to these impressions. In 
the port of Guayaquil, as everywhere else in the low regions 
of the torrid zone, the weather grows cool only after storms 
of rain : and I have observed that when the thermometer 
sinks to 23-8°, De Luc’s hygrometer keeps up to fifty and 
fifty-two degrees; it is, on the contrary, at thirty-seven 
degrees in a temperature of 30'5°. At Cumana, during 
very heavy showers, people in the streets are heard exclaim- 
ing, que hielo! estoy empa/ramado ;* though the thermometer 
* “ What an icy cold 1 I shiver as if I was on the top of the moun- 
tains.” The provincial word emparamarse can be translated only by a 
very long periphrasis. Paramo, in Peruvian puna, is a denomination 
found on all the maps of Spanish America. In the colonies it signifies 
neither a desert nor a heath, but a mountainous place covered with 
stunted trees, exposed to the winds, and in which a damp cold perpetu- 
ally reigns. In the torrid zone, the paramos are generally from one 
thousand six hundred to two thousand, toises high. Snow often falls on 
them, but it remains only a few hours ; for we must not confound, as 
geographers often do, the words paramo and puna with that of nevado, 
in Peruvian ritticapa, a mountain which enters into the limits of 
perpetual snow. These notions are highly interesting to geology and 
the geography of plants ; because, in countries where no height has been 
measured, we" may form an exact idea of the lowest height to which the 
Cordilleras rise, on looking into the map for the words paramo and 
nevado. As the paramoa are almost continually enveloped in a cold and 
thick fog, the people say at Santa F6 and at Mexico, cae un paramito 
