292 
IXOCKS OP VTTLTU2ES. 
Elais guineensis, and is used as food. I have often seen 
canoes arrive at Cumana laden with 3000 cocoa-nuts. 
We did not quit the farm of Pericantral till after sunset. 
The south coast of the gulf presents a most fertile aspect, 
while the northern coast is naked, dry, and rocky. In spite 
of this aridity, and the scarcity of rain, of which sometimes 
none falls for the space of fifteen months,* the peninsula 
of Araya, like the desert of Canound in India, produces 
patillas, or water-melons, weighing from fifty to seventy 
pounds. In the torrid zone, the vapours contained by the 
air form about nine-tenths of the quantity necessary to its 
saturation: and vegetation is maintained by the property 
which the leaves possess of attracting the water dissolved in 
the atmosphere. 
At sunrise, we saw the Zarnuro vultures,! in flocks of forty 
or fifty, perched on the cocoa-trees. These birds range 
t hem selves in files to roost together like fowls. They go to 
roost long before sunset, and do not awake till after the sun 
is above the horizon. This sluggishness seems as if it were 
shared in those climates by the trees with pinnate leaves. 
The mimosas and the tamarinds close their leaves, in a clear 
and serene sky, twenty-five or thirty-five minutes before 
sunset, and unfold them in fhe morning when the solar disk 
has been visible for an equal space of time. As I noticed 
pretty regularly the rising and setting of the sun, for the pur- 
pose of observing the effect of the mirage, or of the terrestrial 
refractions, I was enabled to give continued attention to the 
phenomena of the sleep of plants. I found them the same 
in the steppes, where no irregularity of the ground inter- 
rupted the view of the horizon. It appears, that, accustomed 
during the day to an extreme brilliancy of light, the sensitive 
and other leguminous plants with thiu and delicate leaves are 
* The rains appear to have been more frequent at the beginning of 
1 he 10th century. At any rate, the canon of Granada (Peter Martyr 
d'Anghiera), speaking in the year 1574, of the salt-works of Araya, or of 
llaraia, described in the fifth chapter of this work, mentions showers 
(oadentes imbres) as a very common phenomenon. The same author, 
who died in 1520, affirms that the Indians wrought the salt-works before 
i he arrival of the Spaniards. They dried the salt in the form of bricks ; and 
our writer even then discussed the geological question, whether the 
clayey sal of llaraia contained salt-springs, or whether it had been im. 
pregnated with salt by the periodical inundations of the ocean for age*. 
+ Yultur aura. 
