"N.B. Every species of human knowledge may be reduced to one or other of these divisions. Even _law_ belongs partly to the history of man, partly as a science to dialectics. The twelve languages are Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, German, English.--1780." * * * * * SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY. * * * * * SAILING UP THE ESSEQUIBO. _By Captain J.E. Alexander, H.P., late 16th Lancers, M.R.G.S., &c._ My purpose was now to proceed up the noble Essequibo river towards the El Dorado of Sir Walter Raleigh, and view the mighty forests of the interior, and the varied and beautiful tribes by which they are inhabited. Our residence on the island of Wakenaam had been truly a tropical one. During the night, the tree frogs, crickets, razor-grinders, reptiles, and insects of every kind, kept up a continued concert. At sunrise, when the flowers unfolded themselves, the humming birds, with the metallic lustre glittering on their wings, passed rapidly from blossom to blossom. The bright yellow and black mocking-birds flew from their pendant nests, accompanied by their neighbours, the wild bees, which construct their earthen hives on the same tree. The continued rains had driven the snakes from their holes, and on the path were seen the bush-master (cona-couchi) unrivalled for its brilliant colours, and the deadly nature of its poison; and the labari equally poisonous, which erects its scales in a frightful manner when irritated. The rattlesnake was also to be met with, and harmless tree snakes of many species. Under the river's bank lay enormous caymen or alligators,--one lately killed measured twenty-two feet. Wild deer and the peccari hog were seen in the glades in the centre of the island; and the jaguar and cougour (the American leopard and lion) occasionally swam over from the main land. We sailed up the Essequibo for a hundred miles in a small schooner of thirty tons, and occasionally took to canoes or coorials to visit the creeks. We then went up a part of the Mazaroony river, and saw also the unexplored Coioony: these three rivers join their waters about one hundred miles from the mouth of the Essequibo. In sailing or paddling up the stream, the breadth is so great, and the wooded islands so numerous, that it appears as if we navigated a large lake. The Dutch in former times had cotton, indigo, and cocoa estates up the Essequibo, beyond their capital Kykoveral, on an island at the forks or junction of the three rivers. Now, beyond the islands at the mouth of the Essequibo there are no estates, and the mighty forest has obliterated all traces of former cultivation. Solitude and silence are on either hand, not a vestige of the dwellings of the Hollanders being to be seen; and only occasionally in struggling through the entangled brushwood one stumbles over a marble tombstone brought from the shores of the Zuyderzee.