"After proceeding four hours across the savannahs, we entered into a little wood composed of shrubs and small trees, which is called El Pejual; no doubt because of the great abundance of the 'Pejoa' (Gaultheria odorata,) a plant with very odoriferous leaves. The steepness of the mountain became less considerable, and we felt an indescribable pleasure in examining the plants of this region. Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together in so small a space of ground, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants. At the height of a thousand toises, the lofty savannahs of the hills terminate in a zone of shrubs, which by their appearance, their tortuous branches, their stiff leaves, and the dimensions and beauty of their purple flowers, remind us of what is called in the Cordilleras of the Andes the vegetation of the _paramos_[63] and the _punas_. We find there the {215} family of the Alpine rhododendrons, the thibaudias, the andromedas, the vacciniums, and those befarias[64] with resinous leaves, which we have several times compared to the rhododendron of our European Alps. "Even when nature does not produce the same species in analogous climates, either in the plains of isothermal parallels, or on table-lands the temperature of which resembles that of places nearer the poles, we still remark a striking resemblance of appearance and physiognomy in the vegetation of the most distant countries. This phenomenon is one of the most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things: he is not the less tormented with these insoluble problems of the distribution of beings." 15. Insoluble--yes, assuredly, poor little beaten phantasms of palpitating clay that we are--and who asked us to solve it? Even this Humboldt, quiet-hearted and modest watcher of the ways of Heaven, in the real make of him, came at last to be so far puffed up by his vain science in declining years that he must needs write a Kosmos of things in the Universe, forsooth, as if he knew all about them! when he was not able meanwhile, (and does not seem even to have desired the ability,) to put the slightest Kosmos into his own 'Personal Narrative'; but leaves one to gather what one wants out of {216} its wild growth; or rather, to wash or winnow what may be useful out of its debris, without any vestige either of reference or index; and I must look for these fragmentary sketches of heath and grass through chapter after chapter about the races of the Indian and religion of the Spaniard,--these also of great intrinsic value, but made useless to the general reader by interspersed experiment on the drifts of the wind and the depths of the sea. 16. But one more fragment out of a note (vol. iii., p. 494) I must give, with reference to an order of the Rhododendrons as yet wholly unknown to me.