These and many other of the enjoyments which nature affords are denied to the nations of the North. Many constellations and many vegetable forms, including more especially the most beautiful productions of the earth (palms, tree-ferns, bananas, arborescent grasses, and delicately feathered mimosas), remain for ever unknown to them; for the puny plants pent up in our hothouses, give but a faint idea of the majestic vegetation of the tropics. But the rich development of our language, the glowing fancy of the poet, and the imitative art of the painter, afford us abundant compensation; and enable the imagination to depict in vivid colours the images of an exotic Nature. In the frigid North, amid barren heaths, the solitary student may appropriate all that has been discovered in the most remote regions of the earth, and thus create within himself a world as free and imperishable as the spirit from which it emanates. ILLUSTRATIONS AND ADDITIONS. Footnote 71: p. 210—“_On the Chimborazo, upwards of eight thousand feet higher than Etna_.” Small singing birds, and even butterflies, (as I have myself witnessed in the Pacific,) are often met with at great distances from the shore, during storms blowing off land. In a similar manner insects are involuntarily carried into the higher regions of the atmosphere, to an elevation of 17,000 to 19,000 feet above the plains. The light bodies of these insects are borne upwards by the vertically ascending currents of air caused by the heated condition of the earth’s surface. M. Boussingault, an admirable chemist, who ascended the Gneiss Mountains of Caracas, while holding the appointment of Professor in the newly established Mining Academy at Santa Fé de Bogotá, witnessed, during his ascent to the summit of the Silla, a phenomenon which confirmed in a most remarkable manner this vertical ascent of air. He and his companion, Don Mariano de Rivero, observed at noon a number of luminous whitish bodies rise from the valley of Caracas to the summit of the Silla, an elevation of 5755 feet, and then sink towards the adjacent sea coast. This phenomenon was uninterruptedly prolonged for a whole hour, when it was discovered that the bodies, at first mistaken for a flock of small birds, were a number of minute balls of grass-haums. Boussingault sent me some of this grass, which was immediately recognised by Professor Kunth as a species of Vilfa, a genus of grass which together with Agrostis is of frequent occurrence in the provinces of Caracas and Cumana. It was the _Vilfa tenacissima_ of our _Synopsis Plantarum æquinoctialium Orbis Novi_, t. i. p. 205. Saussure found butterflies on Mont Blanc, and Ramond observed them in the solitudes around the summit of Mont Perdu. When MM. Bonpland, Carlos Montufar, and myself, on the 23rd of June, 1802, ascended the eastern declivity of Mount Chimborazo, to a height of 19,286 feet, and