one) of these Apocryphal Gospels. The simple history of them all is, that they consist of passages copied literally from the genuine Scriptures, with such additions and inventions as the fancy or folly of the artful or superstitious writers suggested. They might not be altogether ill calculated for a religion and a time in which the understandings of the people were to be degraded and enthralled. But in an age and country in which the great aim is to inspire juster and sounder views of religion, no motive but a mischievous one could have suggested the introduction of such impure and noxious matter to those who would never otherwise have heard of its existence. It must be remembered, too, that for those whom curiosity or literary inquiry might engage in the perusal of the Apocryphal writings, they existed already, in a form infinitely more useful and satisfactory; and this consideration will add one proof more to those we have accumulated of the base and malignant purposes of Mr. Hone, and his associates. ART. III.-Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799-1804. By Alexander de Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, &c. &c. Vol. V. 8vo. pp. 865. London. 1821. ALTHOUGH we have taken frequent occasions to deliver our opinion freely of the blemishes which pervade the literary productions of the Baron de Humboldt, we are not insensible of his merits; and cheerfully admit that, in the present instance, and in proportion as he advances into the interior of the equinoctial regions of America, he improves in manner as well as in matter. The sublime and majestic scenery of an invigorating climate, a productive soil, and a luxuriant vegetation, spread over a boundless territory intersected by magnificent rivers, has furnished his eloquent pen with so rapid a succession of new and interesting objects, as to relieve him from any necessity of indulging in those digressions which have sometimes been introduced to give interest to a barren subject. He is still, however, discursive; but as he indulges much less than formerly, in dry scientific dissertations, his beauties become more prominent, and those extraneous matters which, in a Personal Narrative,' we were disposed to consider as misplaced, are now thrown into shade, and occupy only the back ground of the picture. We left the Baron de Humboldt and his companion Bonpland at the island of Panumana, near the confluence of the Rio Meta with the Oroonoko, in their progress up this magnificent river. In the two volumes before us, they complete their navigation * IX. and X. but vol. V. in the original. and and examination of its main branch as high as the junction of the Atabapo; whence they are carried by the Temi and Tuamini, and by a land-journey across the mesopotamia of the Oroonoko and Amazons, to the Rio Negro, a considerable branch of the latter river; then descending the Rio Negro to the confluence of the Cassiquiare, they proceed against the stream of this natural canal to the bifurcation of, or its ramification from, the Oroonoko, where they enter this majestic river a second time, and fall down the stream to Angostura, the capital of Spanish Guaiana. We shall accompany our author along this route, in pursuance of our former plan, noticing such subjects only as may appear to be most interesting either from their novelty or importance. On the 15th April the two travellers left the island of Panumana, and arrived the same day at the little village of San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures, founded by the Jesuit Francisco Gonzales in 1748, and the last of the Christian establishments, in proceeding up the river, that owe their origin to the order of St. Ignatius. It is situated at the distance of a league from the foot of the great cataract, called by the Indians Mapura; and, with another of the same kind about twelve leagues higher up, named Maypures or Quittuna, is formed by innumerable rocky islets, and by compact dykes of granite which, crossing the river, connect two chains of mountains running at right angles to this part of the bed of the Oroonoko, or in the direction of east and west. are Though these rapids are sufficiently strong to interrupt, they do not wholly prevent the navigation of the Oroonoko. By the aid of ropes fixed to the crest of the rocks, the Indians enabled, almost at all times, to haul up their barks or canoes; when the torrents happen to be too violent, they draw them on shore, and, by the help of rollers, force them along the margin till the river again becomes navigable. M. de Humboldt was surprized, he says, to find that, with all the whirling and foaming and tumultuous movement of the waters of the rapids, the roar of which may be heard at the distance of more than a league, the height of the fall, on the whole length of thirty-six miles, did not exceed twenty-eight feet perpendicular. The noise, which is three times as loud by night as by day, gives an inexpressible charm to these solitudes:-- but what, says M. de Humboldt, can be the cause of this increased intensity of sound in a desert, where nothing seems to interrupt the silence of nature?' It is an observation as old as the days of Aristotle, and one which must have been very generally made, that sounds, and particularly those produced by the rushing of water, are more distinctly heard, and at greater distances, by night than by day; yet, as our author author justly observes, the velocity of sound decreases with the decrease of temperature, and the intensity diminishes in air agitated by a wind which blows contrary to its direction. 6 'It may be thought,' says M. de Humboldt, that, even in places not inhabited by man, the hum of insects, the song of birds, the rustling of leaves agitated by the feeblest winds, occasion during the day a confused noise, which we perceive the less because it is uniform, and constantly strikes the ear. Now this noise, however slightly perceptible it may be, may diminish the intensity of a louder noise; and this diminution may cease, if during the calm of the night the song of birds, the hum of insects, and the action of the wind upon the leaves, be interrupted. But this reasoning, even admitting its justness, can scarcely be applied to the forests of the Oroonoko, where the air is constantly filled by an innumerable quantity of moschettoes, where the hum of insects is much louder by night than by day, and where the breeze, if ever it be felt, blows only after sunset.'-vol. v. p. 68. His own opinion is, that the presence of the sun acts upon the propagation and intensity of sound by the obstacles presented by the currents of air of different density, and the partial undulations of the atmosphere caused by the unequal heating of different parts of the soil; that the air being crossed in every direction by small currents of hotter air, the sonorous undulation is divided where the density of the medium changes abruptly; that partial echoes are thus formed, which weaken the sound, because one of the streams turns back on itself; that little movements may thus ride over each other;' and finally that this interruption of homogeneity in the elastic medium is the real cause of the less intensity of sound during the day. The natural scenery around Atures affords a specimen of the descriptive powers of our author, which however suffers not a little in the verbose and languid translation of Helen Maria Williams, alias Mrs. Stone. 'The savannahs of Atures, covered with slender plants and grasses, are real meadows resembling those of Europe; they are never inundated by the rivers, and seem to wait to be ploughed by the hand of man. Notwithstanding their extent, they do not display the monotony of our plains; they surround groups of rocks, and blocks of granite piled on one another. On the very borders of these plains and this open country you find glens scarcely lighted by the rays of the setting sun, and gullies where the humid soil, loaded with arums, heliconias, and lianas, manifests at every step the wild fecundity of nature. Every where just rising above the earth appear those shelves of granite completely bare, that I described at Carichana, and which I have seen no where in the ancient world of such prodigious breadth as in the valley of the Oroonoko. Where springs gush from the bosom of these rocks, verrucarias, psoras, and lichens are fixed on the decomposed granite, and and have there accumulated mould. Little euphorbias, peperomias, and other succulent plants, have taken the place of the cryptogamous tribes; and evergreen shrubs, rhexias, and purple flowered melastomas, form verdant isles amid desert and rocky plains. We are never wearied of repeating, that the distribution of these spots, the clusters of small trees with coriaceous and shining leaves scattered in the savannahs, the limpid rills that dig themselves a channel across the rocks, and wind alternately through fertile places and over bare shelves of granite, every thing here recalls to mind what our gardens and plantations contain most picturesque and lovely. We seem to recognize the industry of man, and the traces of cultivation, amid the wildness of the scenery. But it is not the disposition of the ground that immediately skirts the mission of Atures, which alone gives the landscape so remarkable a physiognomy; the lofty mountains, that bound the horizon on every side, contribute to it also by their form, and the nature of their vegetation. These mountains are in general but seven or eight hundred feet in height above the surrounding plains. Their summit is rounded, as for the most part in granitic mountains, and covered with a thick forest of the laurel tribe. Clusters of palm trees, the leaves of which, curled like feathers, rise majestically at an angle of seventy degrees, are dispersed amid trees with horizontal branches; and their bare trunks, like columns of a hundred, or a hundred and twenty feet high, shoot up into the air, and appearing distinctly against the azure vault of the sky, "resemble a forest planted upon another forest." When, as the moon was going down behind the mountains of Uniana, her reddish disk was hidden behind the pinnated foliage of the palm trees, and again appeared in the aërial zone, that separates the two forests, I thought myself transported for a few moments to the hermitage of the old man, which Mr. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has described as one of the most delicious scenes of the Isle of Bourbon, and I felt how much the mien of the plants and their groupings resembled each other in the two worlds. In describing a small spot of land in an island of the Indian Ocean, the inimitable author of Paul and Virginia has sketched the vast picture of the landscape of the tropics. He knew how to paint nature, not because he had studied it scientifically, but because he felt it in all its harmonious analogies of forms, colours, and interior powers.'—pp. 44-47. Nothing can be more deplorable than the state of the missions of the Oroonoko. Indeed there are but three of them in the space of a hundred leagues above the cataracts, and these are represented to have deteriorated, even to a greater degree than those of the lower Oroonoko, by the appointment of Franciscans to occupy the place of the Jesuits who originally established them. The mission of Atures had dwindled from $20 Indians to 47, and the numbers were still decreasing: they consisted of two different tribes-the one on the west of the Oroonoko, a dirty and disgusting people, called Guahiboes, proud of their savage independence, averse from fixed habitations and regular labour, and known to the missionaries by the name of Indios andantes-the others, on the east, composed of the Macoes and Salivas, a mild and tranquil people, not averse from agriculture, and not difficult to be brought under discipline. They support themselves at present chiefly by the cultivation of the cassava; under the Jesuits, they had maize, French-beans and other European vegetables: the fathers planted sweet oranges and tamarinds round the villages; and they possessed twenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses in the neighbouring savannahs; whereas, now, both have disappeared, and horned cattle are talked of by the Indians as a race that is wholly lost. A few trunks of the orange and tamarind-trees, choked in the forests, are all that is left of the industrious activity of the first missionaries. M. de Humboldt enumerates many causes of the present depopulation, some of which, however, existed in the time of the Jesuits. Epidemic fevers, when attended with great mortality, have frequently put whole villages to flight; the appearance of small-pox among them; a great drought, or any other .unforeseen and unavoidable misfortune has seldom failed to disperse them among the woods. But that which, according to our traveller, chiefly tends to depopulate the settlements, is the repugnance of the Indians to the regulations of the missions; to which may be added, the insalubrity of a climate at once hot and damp, bad nourishment, want of care in the diseases of children, and the guilty practice of preventing pregnancy by the use of deleterious herbs.' To prevent the missions from being wholly deserted, the fathers make hostile incursions into the villages of the independent Indians, under the name of entrados, which are avowedly undertaken for the conquest of souls,' though it is obviously necessary, in the first place, to secure the bodies. To effect this, the natives are usually attacked by night in their hovels, and their children seized and carried off to be distributed among the Indians of the missions, as serfs. An affecting instance of maternal tenderness, displayed on an occasion of this inhuman practice, is given by M. de Humboldt, which, he justly observes, proves how much the system calls for the care of the legislator.' In 1797 the missionary of San Fernando had led his Indians to the banks of the Rio Guaviare, on one of those hostile incursions, which are prohibited alike by religion and the Spanish laws. They found in an Indian hut a Guahiba mother with three children, two of whom were still infants. They were occupied in preparing the flour of cassava. Resistance was impossible; the father was gone to fish, and the mother tried in vain to flee with her children. Scarcely had she reached |