scarcely ever used in the narrative of my travels; although I believe that of all investigators of nature now living, Bonpland, Martius, Poppig, Robert and Richard Schomburgk, and myself, are those who have spent the longest period of time in primeval forests in the interior of a great continent. Rich as is the Spanish language, (as I have already remarked), in appellations of distinct and definite meaning in the description of nature, yet the same word “Monte” is employed for mountain and forest, for cerro, (montaña) and for selva. In an inquiry into the true breadth and greatest easterly extension of the chain of the Andes, I have shewed how this two-fold signification of the word “monte” led to the introduction, in a fine and extensively circulated English map of South America, of high mountain ranges, where, in reality, only plains exist. When the Spanish map of La Cruz Olmedilla, which has served as the foundation of so many other maps, shewed “Montes de Cacao,”[66] “cacao woods,” Cordilleras were made to rise although the cacao seeks only the lowest and hottest localities. If we comprehend in one general view the wooded region which includes the whole of the interior of South America, from the grassy steppes of Venezuela (los Llanos de Caracas) to the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, or from 8° North to 19° South latitude, we shall perceive that this connected forest of the tropical zone has an extent unequalled in any other portion of the earth’s surface. Its area is about twelve times that of Germany. Traversed in all directions by systems of rivers, in which the minor and tributary streams sometimes exceed our Rhine or our Danube in the abundance of their waters, it owes the wonderful luxuriance of the growth of its trees to the combined influence of great moisture and high temperature. In the temperate zone, and especially in Europe and Northern Asia, forests may be named from particular genera or species, which, growing together as social plants, (plantæ sociales) form separate and distinct woods. In the northern forests of Oaks, Pines, and Birches, and in the eastern forests of Limes or Linden trees, usually only one species of Amentaceæ, Coniferæ, or Tiliaceæ, prevails or is predominant; sometimes a single species of Needle-trees is intermingled with the foliage of trees of other classes. Tropical forests, on the other hand, decked with thousands of flowers, are strangers to such uniformity of association; the exceeding variety of their flora renders it vain to ask of what trees the primeval forest consists. A countless number of families are here crowded together, and even in small spaces individuals of the same species are rarely associated. Each day, and at each change of place, new forms present themselves to the traveller, who, however, often finds that he cannot reach the blossoms of trees whose leaves and ramifications had previously arrested his attention.