These and many other of the enjoyments which Nature affords are wanting to the nations of the North. Many constellations, and many vegetable forms,--and of the latter, those which are most beautiful, (palms, tree ferns, plantains, arborescent grasses, and the finely-divided feathery foliage of the Mimosas),--remain for ever unknown to them. Individual plants languishing in our hot-houses can give but a very faint idea of the majestic vegetation of the tropical zone. But the high cultivation of our languages, the glowing fancy of the poet, and the imitative art of the painter, open to us sources whence flow abundant compensations, and from whence our imagination can derive the living image of that more vigorous nature which other climes display. In the frigid North, in the midst of the barren heath, the solitary student can appropriate mentally all that has been discovered in the most distant regions, and can create within himself a world free and imperishable as the spirit by which it is conceived. ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. [1] p. 3.--“_On the Chimborazo, eight thousand feet higher than Etna._” Small singing birds, and even butterflies, are found at sea at great distances from the coast, (as I have several times had opportunities of observing in the Pacific), being carried there by the force of the wind when storms come off the land. In the same involuntary manner insects are transported into the upper regions of the atmosphere, 16000 or 19000 feet above the plains. The heated crust of the earth occasions an ascending vertical current of air, by which light bodies are borne upwards. M. Boussingault, an excellent chemist who, as Professor at the newly instituted Mining Academy at Santa Fé de Bogota, visited the Gneiss Mountains of Caraccas, in ascending to the summit of the Silla witnessed, together with his companion Don Mariano de Rivero, a phenomenon affording a remarkable ocular demonstration of the fact of a vertically ascending current. They saw in the middle of the day, about noon, whitish shining bodies rise from the valley of Caraccas to the summit of the Silla, which is 5400 (5755 E.) feet high, and then sink down towards the neighbouring sea coast. These movements continued uninterruptedly for the space of an hour, and the objects, which at first were mistaken for a flock of small birds, proved to be small agglomerations of straws or blades of grass. Boussingault sent me some of the straws, which were immediately recognised by Professor Kunth for a species of Vilfa, a genus which, together with Agrostis, is very abundant in the provinces of Caraccas and Cumana: it was the Vilfa tenacissima of our Synopsis Plantarum æquinoctialium Orbis Novi, T. i. p. 205. Saussure found butterflies on Mont Blanc, as did Ramond in the solitudes which surround the summit of the Mont Perdu. When Bonpland, Carlos Montufar, and myself, reached, on the 23d of June, 1802, on the eastern declivity of the Chimborazo, the height of 18096 (19286 E.)