Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz

“ The first view of high mountains, the first glimpse of the broad ocean, the first sight of a tropical vegetation in all its fulness, are epochs in one’s life. This wonderful South American forest is so matted together and intertwined with gigantic parasites that it seems more like a solid, compact mass of green than like the leafy screen, vibrating with every breeze and transparent to the sun, which represents the forest in the temperate zone. ”

“ She seemed to have but one garment,—a long, brown, stuff robe, girt round the waist; as she strode about the fire, throwing on fresh logs and stirring the dying embers, the flames blazed up in her face, lighting her tawny skin and long, unkempt hair, flickering over the figures of women and children about her, and shedding a warm glow over the forest which made the setting to the picture. This is the only very tall Indian woman I have seen; usually the women are rather short of stature. ”

“ Many a Brazilian lady passes day after day without stirring beyond her four walls, scarcely ever showing herself at the door or window; for she is always in a slovenly dishabille, unless she expects company. It is sad to see these stifled existences; without any contact with the world outside, without any charm of domestic life, without books or culture of any kind, the Brazilian Senhora in this part of the country either sinks contentedly into a vapid, empty, aimless life, or frets against her chains, and is as discontented as she is useless. ”

“ Groups of trees rose directly from the lake, their roots hidden below its surface, while numerous blackened and decayed trunks stood up from the water in all sorts of picturesque and fantastic forms. Sometimes the trees had thrown down from their branches those singular aerial roots so common here, and seemed standing on stilts. Here and there, where we coasted along by the bank, we had a glimpse into the deeper forest, with its drapery of lianas and various creeping vines, and its parasitic sipos twining close around the trunks or swinging themselves from branch to branch like loose cordage. ”

“ But there are families with which he fancies himself equally familiar, the tropical representatives of which will never seem to him like old acquaintances. Thus the tree which furnishes the Indian rubber belongs to the Milk-weed family. Every one knows the Milk-weeds of the North, to be seen, as humble herbs, all along the roadsides, on the edges of our woods and in the sands of our beaches. Yet on the Amazons, the Euphorbiaceæ, so small and unobtrusive with us, assume the form of colossal trees, constituting a considerable part of its strange and luxuriant forest-growth. ”

“ As I stood there, panoramas from the Swiss mountains came up to my memory, and I fancied myself on the Alps, looking across the plain of Switzerland instead of the bed of the Amazons; the distant line of the Santarem hills on the southern bank of the river, and lower than the northern chain, representing the Jura range. As if to complete the comparison, Alpine lichens were growing among the cacti and palms, and a crust of Arctic cryptogamous growth covered rocks, between which sprang tropical flowers. ”

“ There is not a natural surface of rock, unless recently broken, to be found anywhere.
The sun had set before we drove into the pretty town of Petropolis, the summer paradise of all Rio Janeirans whose circumstances enable them to leave the heat and dirt and vile smells of the city, for the pure air and enchanting views of the Serra. In a central position stands the summer palace of the Emperor, a far gayer and more cheerful-looking edifice than the palace at San Christovāo. ”

“ I never see one without longing to follow its picturesque windings into the depths of the wood; and to me the igarapé remains the most beautiful and the most characteristic feature of the Amazonian scenery. This one of Vigia was especially pretty. Clumps of the light, exquisitely graceful Assai palm shot up everywhere from the denser forest; here and there the drooping bamboo, never seen in the higher Amazons, dipped its feathery branches into the water, covered sometimes to their very tips with purple bloom of convolvulus ”

“ Nothing can be more picturesque than the situation of this sitio. It is surrounded by magnificent masses of rock, which seem embedded in the forest, as it were; and by its side a cascade comes leaping down through the trees, so hidden by them that, though you hear the voice of the water constantly, you only see its glimmer here and there among the green foliage. The house itself stands on a fine specimen of moraine, flanked on one side by a bank of red morainic soil, overtopped by boulders. It is so built in among huge masses of rock that its walls seem half natural. ”

“ The work of the naturalist, in our day, is to explore worlds the existence of which is already known; to investigate, not to discover. The first explorers, in this modern sense, were Humboldt in the physical world, Cuvier in natural history, Lavoisier in chemistry, La Place in astronomy. They have been the pioneers in the kind of scientific work characteristic of our century. We who have chosen Brazil as our field must seek to make ourselves familiar with its physical features, its mountains and its rivers, its animals and plants. ”

“ There can be no organic relation between a truly liberal form of government and a people for whom, taking them as a whole, little or no education is provided, whose religion is administered by a corrupt clergy, and who, whether white or black, are brought up under the influence of slavery. Liberty will not abide in the laws alone; it must have its life in the desire of the nation, its strength in her resolve to have and to hold it. Another feature which makes a painful impression on the stranger is the enfeebled character of the population. ”

“ If the morning walk in the woods is delightful, the evening stroll on the beach in front of the house is no less so, when the water is dyed in the purple sunset, and the quiet of the scene is broken here and there by a fire on the sands, around which a cluster of Indians are cooking their supper. ”

“ As we coast along their banks, it is delightful to watch the exquisite vegetation with which we have yet to become familiar. The 154tree which most immediately strikes the eye, and stands out from the mass of green with wonderful grace and majesty, is the lofty, slender Assai palm, with its crown of light plume-like leaves, and its bunches of berry-like fruit, hanging from a branch that shoots out almost horizontally, just below the leaves. Houses on the shore break the solitude here and there. ”

“ Pernambuco is by no means so picturesque as Bahia or Rio de Janeiro. It has a more modern air than either of these, but looks also more cleanly and more prosperous. Many of the streets are wide, and the river running through the business part of the city, crossed by broad, handsome bridges, is itself suggestive of freshness. The country is more open and flat than farther south. In our afternoon drive some of the views across wide, level meadows, if we could have put elms here and there in the place of palms, would have reminded us of scenery at home. ”

“ If in countless centuries to come the ocean should continue to eat its way into the Valley of the Amazons, once more transforming the lower part of the basin into a gulf, as it was during the cretaceous period, the time might arrive when geographers, finding the Madeira emptying almost immediately into the sea, would ask themselves whether it had ever been indeed a branch of the Amazons, just as they now question whether the Tocantins is a tributary of the main stream or an independent river. ”

“ There is much that is discouraging in the aspect of Brazil, even for those who hope and believe as I do, that she has before her an honorable and powerful career. There is much also that is very cheering, that leads me to believe that her life as a nation will not belie her great gifts as a country. Should her moral and intellectual endowments grow into harmony with her wonderful natural beauty and wealth, the world will not have seen a fairer land. At present there are several obstacles to this progress; obstacles which act like a moral disease upon the people. ”

“ All that we hear or read of the extent of the Amazons and its tributaries fails to give an idea of its immensity as a whole. One must float for months upon its surface, in order to understand how fully water has the mastery over land along its borders. Its watery labyrinth is rather a fresh-water ocean, cut up and divided by land, than a network of rivers. Indeed, this whole valley is an aquatic, not a terrestrial basin ”

“ On several occasions I have alluded in terms of praise to the working of the institutions of Brazil. Nothing can be more liberal than the Constitution of the land; every guaranty is therein secured to the freest assertion of all the natural rights of man. And yet there are some features in the habits of the people, probably the results of an antiquated social condition, which impede the progress of the nation. ”

“ There is, however, another point of view, more general, but perhaps more comprehensive also, from which every intelligent man may form an estimate of the character of a people which, if sincere, will be in the main sound and just, without including an intimate knowledge of their institutions, or the practical working of their laws. My scientific life has brought me into relations with a world wholly unknown to me before; under conditions more favorable than were possible for my predecessors in the same region, I have studied this tropical nature, so rich, so grandiose, so instructive ”

“ I must say that, if the absolutely uninterrupted attention of an audience is any test of its intelligence, no man could ask a better one than that which Mr. Agassiz has had the pleasure of addressing in Rio de Janeiro. It has also been a great pleasure to him, after teaching for nearly twenty years in English, to throw off the fetters of a foreign tongue and speak again in French. After all, with a few exceptions, a man’s native language remains for him the best; it is the element in which he always moves most at ease. ”

“ If he does not get the game, he has the emotion; every now and then he thinks the creature is at hand, and he has a momentary agitation, heightened by the cries of the dogs and the answering cry of the sportsmen, who strive to arouse them to the utmost by their own shouts, and then if the animal turns back into the thicket all sound dies away, and to a very pandemonium of voices succeed the silence and solitude of the forest. ”

“ He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon an amalgamation of races, more wide-spread here than in any other country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy. At a time when the new social status of the negro is a subject of vital importance in our statesmanship, we should profit by the experience of a country where, though slavery exists, there is far more liberality toward the free negro than he has ever enjoyed in the United States. ”

“ The wide street, bordered for two or three miles with mangueiras, leads into the wooded country, where many a narrow green path in the forest tempts one to long rambles. One of these paths has been a favorite walk of mine on account of the beauty and luxuriance of the vegetation, making some parts of it shady even at noonday. I have often followed it for two or three miles in the early morning, between six and eight o’clock, when the verdant walls on either side are still fresh and dewy. Beautiful as it is, it leads to one of the saddest of all abodes. ”

“ We are constantly astonished at the variety of palms. A palm is such a rarity in our hot-houses, that we easily forget how numerous and varied they are in their native forests. We have the scarlet-oak, the white-oak, the scrub-oak, the chestnut-oak, the swamp-oak, and many others. And so in the tropical forest there is the cocoanut-palm, with its swollen, bulb-like stem when young, its tall, straight trunk when full grown, its cluster of heavy fruit, and its long, plume-like, drooping flower ”

“ The walls, the floors, the very furniture,—your hammock at night and your clothes in the morning,—feel damp and have a sort of clammy chill; and the sun comes out with such fitful gleams, that, intense as is its heat while it lasts, nothing becomes thoroughly dried. ”