meal resembling sago, which, like the farina of the jatropha root, is dried in thin bread-like slices. The fermented juice of the tree forms the sweet intoxicating palm wine of the Guaranis. The scaly fruits, which resemble in their appearance reddish fir cones, afford, like the plaintain and almost all tropical fruits, a different kind of nutriment, according as they are eaten after their saccharine substance is fully developed, or in their earlier or more farinaceous state. Thus in the lowest stage of man’s intellectual development, we find the existence of an entire people bound up with that of a single tree; like the insect which lives exclusively on a single part of a particular flower. Since the discovery of the New Continent, the Llanos have become habitable to men. In order to facilitate communication between the Orinoco country and the coasts, towns have been built here and there on the banks of the streams which flow through the Steppes.[33] The rearing of cattle has began over all parts of these vast regions. Huts, formed of reeds tied together with thongs and covered with skins, are placed at distances of a day’s journey from each other; numberless herds of oxen, horses, and mules, estimated at the peaceful epoch of my journey at a million and a half, roam over the Steppe. The immense multiplication of these animals, originally brought by man from the Old Continent, is the more remarkable from the number of dangers with which they have to contend. When, under the vertical rays of the never-clouded sun, the carbonized turfy covering falls into dust, the indurated soil cracks asunder as if from the shock of an earthquake. If at such times two opposing currents of air, whose conflict produces a rotatory motion, come in contact with the soil, the plain assumes a strange and singular aspect. Like conical-shaped clouds[34] the points of which descend to the earth, the sand rises through the rarified air in the electrically charged centre of the whirling current; resembling the loud waterspout dreaded by the experienced mariner. The lowering sky sheds a dim, almost straw-coloured light on the desolate plain. The horizon draws suddenly nearer; the Steppe seems to contract, and with it the heart of the wanderer. The hot dusty particles which fill the air increase its suffocating heat,[35] and the east wind, blowing over the long-heated soil, brings with it no refreshment, but rather a still more burning glow. The pools which the yellow fading branches of the fan palm had protected from evaporation now gradually disappear. As in the icy north the animals become torpid with cold, so here, under the influence of the parching drought, the crocodile and the boa become motionless and fall asleep, deeply buried in the dry mud. Every where the death-threatening drought prevails, and yet, by the play of the refracted rays of light producing the phenomenon of the mirage, the thirsty traveller is every where pursued by the illusive image of a