I will now detail the conjectures of that traveller, after having first given my own earlier ones. According to him the course of the Upper Orinoco, to the east of Esmeralda, is directed from south-east to north-west; my estimations of latitude for the mouths of the Padamo and the Gehette appear to be respectively 19′ and 36′ too small. Schomburgk conjectures that the sources of the Orinoco are situated in lat. 2° 30′, and the fine “Map of Guayana, to illustrate the route of R. H. Schomburgk,” which accompanies the splendid English work entitled _Views in the Interior of Guiana_, places its geographical sources in 64° 56′ west long., _i.e._, 1° 6′ west of Esmeralda, and only 48′ of longitude nearer to the Atlantic than I had determined the position of this point. Astronomical combinations led Schomburgk to place the mountain of Maravaca, which is about ten thousand feet high, in 3° 41′ lat. and 65° 48′ west long. The Orinoco was scarcely three hundred yards wide near the mouth of the Padamo or Paramu, and more to the west, where it expands to a width of from four to six hundred yards, it was so shallow, and so full of sandbanks, that the expedition was obliged to dig channels, as the river bed was only fifteen inches deep. Fresh-water dolphins were still to be seen in great numbers everywhere—a phenomenon which the zoologists of the eighteenth century would not have expected to find in the Orinoco and the Ganges. Footnote 59: p. 158—“_The most luxurious product of a tropical climate_.” The _Bertholletia excelsa_ (Juvia), of the family of Myrtaceæ (and placed in Richard Schomburgk’s proposed division of Lecythideæ), was first described in _Plantes Equinoxiales_, t. i. 1808, p. 122, tab. 36. This colossal and magnificent tree offers, in the perfect development of its cocoa-like, round, close-grained, woody fruit, inclosing the three-cornered and also woody seed-vessels, the most remarkable example of luxuriant organic development. The Bertholletia grows in the forests of the Upper Orinoco, between the Padamo and the Ocamu, in the vicinity of the mountain of Mapaya, as well as between the rivers Amaguaca and Gehette.[IH] Footnote 60: p. 158—“_Grass stalks, whose joints measure upwards of eighteen feet from knot to knot_.”