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Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia, a non-fiction book by Samuel G. Goodrich |
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Chapter 12. Parley Describes The Natural Beauties Of America |
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_ CHAPTER XII. PARLEY DESCRIBES THE NATURAL BEAUTIES OF AMERICA Let us now leave for a while the cruel Spaniards, and talk about the beauties of nature, in these new discovered countries. In these extensive regions, every thing appeared new and wonderful; not only the inhabitants, but the whole face of nature was totally different from anything that had been seen in Europe. Grand ridges of mountains, numerous volcanoes, some of them, though under the Equator, covered with perpetual snows. Noble rivers, whose course, in several instances, exceeds three thousand miles. Here are found the palm-tree, the cedar, the tamarind, the guaiacum, the sassafras, the hickory, the chestnut, the walnut of many different kinds, the wild cherry (sometimes a hundred feet high), and more than fifty different sorts of oak. The plane, of which there are two kinds, one found in Asia, which is called the oriental plane: that found in America is called the occidental plane; but the Americans call it button-wood, or sycamore. Its foliage is richer, and its leaves of a more beautiful green than the oriental. It grows to a great size. The cypress is perhaps the largest of the American trees; it is a more than a hundred and twenty feet high; and the diameter of the trunk at forty or fifty feet from the ground is sometimes eight or ten feet. Another tree of gigantic magnitude is the wild cotton or Cuba tree. A canoe made from the single trunk of this tree has been know to contain a hundred persons. Above all these in beauty is the majestic magnolia which shoots up to the height of more than a hundred feet; its trunk perfectly straight, surmounted by a thick expanded head of pale green foliage, in the form of a cone. From the centre of the flowery crown which terminates each of its branches, a flower of the purest white arises, having the form of a rose, from six to nine inches in diameter. To the flower succeeds a crimson cone; this, in opening, exhibits round seeds of the finest coral red, surrounded by delicate threads, six inches long. Here, every plant and tree displays its most majestic form. Upon the shady banks of the Madelina there grows a climbing plant which the botanists call Aristolochia, the flowers of which are four feet in circumference, and children amuse themselves with covering their heads with them as hats. The Banana which grows in all the hot parts of America, and furnishes the Indians with the chief part of their daily food, producing more nutritious substance, in less space, and with less trouble than any other known plant. It is here that the ground produces the sugar-cane, the coffee, and the cocoa-nut from which is produced the chocolate. The vanilla, the anana or pine apple, and many other delicious fruits. The cacao, though generally pronounced cocoa, must not be confounded with the Cocoa Palm which produces that largest of all nuts, the Cocoa-nut. These trees and plants which I have mentioned, and many more equally beautiful, are all natives of the American woods. But the European settlers, when they came, brought over to Europe many valuable kinds of fruit and plants, which they did not find here; and I never was more delighted than once on passing through Virginia, to observe the dwellings of the settlers shaded by orange, lemon, and pomegranate trees, that fill the air with the perfume of their flowers, while their branches are loaded with fruit. Strawberries of native growth, of the richest flavour, spring up beneath your feet; and when these are passed away, every grove and field looks like a cherry orchard. Then follow the peaches, every hedge-row is planted with them. But it is the flowers and the flowering shrubs, that, beyond all else, render these regions so beautiful. No description can give an idea of the variety, the profusion, and the luxuriance of them. The Dog-wood, whose lateral fan-like branches are dotted all over with star-like blossoms of splendid white, as large as those of the gumcistus. The straight silvery column of the Papan fig, crowned with a canopy of large indented leaves; and the wild orange tree, mixed with the odoriferous and common laurel, form striking ornaments of this enchanting scene, with many other lovely flowers too numerous to describe. There is another charm that enchants the wanderer in the American woods. In a bright day in the summer months you walk through an atmosphere of butterflies, so gaudy in hue, and so varied in form, that I often thought they looked like flowers on the wing. Some of them are large, measuring three or four inches across the wing, but many, and those of the most beautiful, are small. Some have wings the most dainty lavender, and bodies of black; others are fawn and rose colour, and others are orange and bright blue: but pretty as they are, it is their numbers more than their beauty; and their gay, and noiseless movement through the air, crossing each other in chequered maze, that so delights the eye. That beautiful production, the humming bird, is also the sportive inhabitant of these warm climates, and I think they surpass all the works of nature in singularity of form, splendour of colour, and variety of species. They are found in all the West India islands and in most parts of the American continent: the smallest species does not exceed the size of some of the bees. There are so many different kinds, and each so beautiful, that it is impossible to describe them. They are constantly on the wing, collecting insects from the blossoms of the tamarind, the orange, or any other tree that happens to be in flower: and the humming noise proceeds from the surprising velocity with which they move their wings. _ |
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