AND

No. 55.

THE IMPERIAL TOURISTS. Tour of Their Imperial Highnesses the Archdukes John and Lewis of Austria. THE Cathedral of Litchfield, where we arrived on the 9th of November 1815, is built in the most ancient style: in this cathedral there is a monument of the celebrated Garrick. From Litchfield the road lies along the side of the great canal, through a beautiful valley. This canal crosses the river Trent, over which it is conducted by means of a brick bridge (or aqueduct) supported by twelve arches.

At Derby we halted: the town lies upon the river Derwent, at the foot of the mountains which form the north side of the county of Derby, and all containing mines. Of the five churches in this town, that of All Saints is admired on account of its steeple, which was built in the reign of Henry VIII. and, as we were informed, is 178 feet in height. We examined a silk mill, which is remarkable, as being the first that was erected in England. John Lombe, the person who erected it, had travelled to Italy for the purpose of procuring drawings and models of the very ingenious and complicated machines which are employed in that country. In the year 1716 he obtained a paten for fourteen years. This mill furnishes three or four hundred weight of spun silk per week, and employs between two and three hundred workmen. In Derby there are many warehouses of the beautiful vases, candlesticks, lamps, &c. which are made of spar: a white calcareous stone, which is found about three miles from. Derby, is used for similar purposes: Brown's warehouse for these articles appeared to us the most complete. The utensils and ornaments of dark blue spar were particularly beautiful. Some were shewn to us, consisting of a single piece, and which are fifteen inches in height, and nine or ten inches in diameter. The most beautiful pieces, of a dark blue, inclining to violet, are not quite of their natural colour, but are changed by the operation of heat.

After spar is sawed, the vessels are turned upon the lathe, with steel tools. A steam engine sets in motion four VOL. II.

From this foundry we went to a manufactory of porcelain. The paste (or clay) is good; but the painting is very indifferent. The colours, with the exception of the blue, are not at all beautiful. The lathe is set in motion by a large wheel, moved by a child: this is advantageous to the workman who gives the form, because, not being obliged to tread with his foot, he can hold faster, and work with greater certainty and accuracy.

Two canals unite at Derby, and pour their waters into the Derwent. We left the town on the 10th. The country becomes more and more irregular. The eminences are entirely cultivated. At a pretty village, the road divides into two branches, one of which leads to Belper, the other to Wirksworth. We took the latter. It continually ascends, and the country becomes gradually more barren. Here, as well as in other parts of. England, we meet men on horseback, with women sitting behind them, on a saddle contrived for the purpose. In the neighbourhood of Wirksworth, the openings of the mines are to be seen on all the surrounding hills.

The lead-mines in the county of Derby produce annually five or six thousand tons. In many of them the lead is mixed with calamine, which is separated in reverberatory furnaces, then calcined, pounded and washed.

In a valley near Cromford, we were shewn a great cotton mill, which was erected by Sir Richard Arkwright in 1792. It was he who first introduced into England the great cotton mills, and led to the flourishing state of this branch of industry.

PRICE 1s.

In the neighbourhood of Matlock we saw a spring, which possesses the property of covering things that are dipped in it, in the space of six minutes, with a calcareous crust. The water is lukewarm, being of the temperature of 68 degrees of Fahrenheit. The proprietor of the spring, which is in a cavern that is closed up, has built a shed, or hut, near it, in which the incrusted things are sold; they consist of eggs, little baskets, skulls of animals, birds' nests, &c. The sale of them is considerable, especially to the company who come to take the waters at Matlock. The crust which thus covers the articles put into the water, is of a brown colour. The warm springs at Matlock

were discovered in the seventeenth century. There are three bathing houses, and sufficient room for four hundred persons.

We went down into the celebrated cavern, known by the name of Cumberland's Cavern. It did not appear to us very interesting, except for mineralogists, who visit it with a hammer in their hands, and make a rich collection of crystallizations of spar, &c. We were told that finer specimens were to be found in Rutland's Cavern, on the other side of Matlock. They have lately discovered in it, copper combined with vitriol. In Matlock, as well as Derby, there are magazines of Sparvases. That of Messrs. Brown and Mawe contains an uncommonly beautiful collection of these articles. We saw here specimens of the newly discovered varieties of the red spar. We were informed that Mr. Mawe is one of the first mineralogists in England: he has written a work on the minerals of Derbyshire.

(To be continued.)

REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

SOUTH AMERICA. Humboldt's Personal Narrative. (Continued) M. de Humboldt and his friend having visited the convent of Caripe, one of the finest situations in these tropical regions, thence took an excursion to a celebrated cavern, called the Cueva del

Guacharo, of which a highly picturesque | tooth, by its feet without the membranes description is given. that unite the anterior phalanxes of the claws. It is the first example of a nocturnal bird among the passeres dentirostrati. In its manners it has analogies both to the goat-sucker and the alpine-crow. The plumage of the guacharo is of a dark bluish gray, mixed with small streaks and specks of black. Large white spots, which have the form of a heart, and which are bordered with black, mark the head, the wings, and the tail. The eyes of the bird are hurt by the blaze of day; they are blue, and smaller than those of the goat-suckers. The spread of the wings, which are composed of seventeen or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a half. The guacharo quits the cavern at nightfall, especially when the moon shines. It is almost the only frugiferous nocturnal bird that is yet known; the conformation of its feet sufficiently shows, that it does not hunt like our owls. It feeds on very hard fruits. It is difficult to form an idea of the horrible noise occasioned by thousands of these birds in the dark part of the cavern. The Indians shewed us the nests of these birds, by fixing torches to the end of a long pole. These nests were fifty or sixty feet high above our heads, in holes in the shape of funnels, with which the roof of the grotto is pierced like a sieve.

"The Cueva del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock. The entrance is toward the south, and forms a vault eighty feet broad, and seventy-two feet high. The rock that surmounts the grotto is covered with trees of gigantic height. The mammee tree, and the genipa, with large and shining leaves, raise their branches vertically toward the sky; while those of the courbaril and the erythrina form, as they extend themselves, a thick vault of verdure. Plants of the family of pothos, with succulent stems, oxalises, and orchidea of a singular structure (a dendrobium, with a golden flower, spotted with black, three inches long), rise in the driest clefts of the rock; while creeping plants, waving in the winds, are interwoven in festoons before the opening of the cavern. We distinguished in these festoons a bignonia of a violet blue, the purple dolichos, and, for the first time, that magnificent solandra (scandens), the orange flower of which has a fleshy tube, more than four inches long. The entrance of grottoes, like the view of cascades, derive their principal charm from the situation, more or less majestic, in which they are placed, and which in some sort determines the character of the landscape. What a contrast between the Cueva of Caripe, and those caverns of the north crowned with oaks and gloomy larch-trees!

But this luxury of vegetation embelLishes not only the outside of the vault it appears even in the vestibule of the grotto. We saw with astonishment plantain-leaved heliconias eighteen feet high, and arborescent arums, follow the banks of the river, even to those subterranean places, The vegetation continues in the cave of Caripe, as in those deep crevices of the Andes, half excluded from the light of day, and does not disappear, till, advancing in the interior, we reach thirty or forty paces from the entrance. We measured the way by means of a cord: and we went on about

"The Indians enter into the Cueva del Guacharo once a year, near Midsummer, armed with poles, by means of which they destroy the greater part of the nests. At this season several thousands of birds are killed; and the old ones, as if to defend their brood, hover over the heads of the Indians, uttering terrible cries. The young which fall to the ground, are opened on the spot. Their peritoneum is extremely loaded with fat, and a layer of fat reaches from the abdomen to the anus, forming

a kind of cushion between the legs of the bird. At the period which is commonly called at Caripe the oil harvest, the Indians build huts with palm leaves, near the entrance, and even in the porch of 430 feet, without being obliged to light our the cavern. There, with a fire of brushtorches. Daylight penetrates even into this wood, they melt in pots of clay the fat of region, because the grotto forms but one the young birds just killed. This fat is single channel, which keeps the same di-known by the name of butter, or oil, (manrection, from south-east to north-west. teca, or aveite) of the guacharo. It is half Where the light begins to fail, we heard liquid, transparent, without smell, and so from afar the hoarse sounds of the nocturnal pure, that it may be kept above a year birds; sounds which the natives think be- without becoming rancid. At the convent long exclusively to those subterraneous of Caripe no other oil is used in the kitchen places. of the monks, but that of the cavern; and we never observed that it gave the aliments

"The guacharo is of the size of our fowls, has the mouth of the goat-sucker and procnias, and the port of those vultures, the crooked beak of which is surrounded with stiff silky hairs. Suppressing with M. Cuvier, the order of picæ, we must refer this extraordinary bird to the passeres, the genera of which are connected with each other by almost imperceptible transiIt forms a new genus, very different from the goat-sucker, by the force of its voice, by the considerable strength of its beak, containing a double

tions.

a disagreeable taste or smell. The quantity of this oil collected, little corresponds with the carnage made every year in the grotto by the Indians. It appears that they do not get above 150 or 160 bottles (60 cubic inches each) of very pure manteca; the rest, less transparent, is preserved in large earthen vessels. This branch of industry reminds us of the harvest of pigeon's oil, of which some thousands of barrels were formerly collected in Carolina.

When the crops and gizzards of the

young birds are opened in the cavern, they are found to contain all sorts of hard and dry fruits, which furnish, under the singular name of guacharo seed, semilla del guacharo, a very celebrated remedy against intermittent fevers. The old birds carry these seeds to their young. They are carefully collected, and sent to the sick at Cariaco, and other places in the low regions, where fevers are prevalent.”

We have extracted, nearly at length, the history of this remarkable bird, and cannot quote the details of the advance, 1458 feet into the cavern, where there is a subterraneous rivulet, as if every thing conspired to complete this South American Tartarus, with its Phlegethon and Stygian birds. Nor are superstitions wanting: it was with difficulty the travellers could get the Indians to proceed so far into the interior, where they held that the ghosts of their fathers and evil spirits resided. "Man (said they) should avoid places which are neither enlightened by the sun (Zis), nor by the moon (Nuna).” To go and join the guacharoes is their phrase for dying, and going to rejoin their ancestors; and as beyond the distance we have mentioned, nothing would induce them to penetrate, the Europeans were obliged to return. Nor can we wonder at their resolution,

or rather want of resolution; for even at this depth, a strange sort of vegetation has sprung up from the seeds dropped by the birds. Blanched stalks, and half-formed leaves, growing to the height of two feet-pale and disfigured vegetables, unlike those on the “upper earth," presented a sufficiently spectral appearance to confirm their opinions that nothing natural existed here. It is recorded at the convent, however, that a Bishop of St. Thomas went more than a thousand feet further; perhaps the natives thought themselves safer with a Roman Catholic bishop than with Protestant heretics, in such quarters.

M. de Humboldt, ever deducing scientific information from his remarks on natural phenomena, enters into a geological inquiry into the nature of caverns, of which very few are exhibited in primitive formations. These he divides into three distinct classes, according to their configuration : first, those having the form of large clefts, or crevices, like veins not filled with ore: second, those which form galleries through rocks or mountains, and are open at each end and third, those (the most common) which have a suc