The post from Cumana and Guiana arrives at Caracas once a-month. It is earlier or later according to the state of the roads and the rivers. The letters of Guiana go directly from Barcelona by one carrier, and those of Cumana and Margarita by another.-The last arrive at their destination in twelve days, those of Guiana at theirs in thirty.

SECTION IX.

MANNERS AT CUMANA, &C. IN PARTICULAR.

AT CUMANA, the European inhabitants, and the descendants of Europeans, are chiefly occupied in commercial enterprise; this and Barcelona being ports where such trade is carried on.

The manners and customs of these people are nearly allied to those of their brethren in the other great cities of Spanish America. One, however, of the most singular of their customs is, that of passing most of their evenings sitting on chairs placed in the river. The Manzanares, a river, the temperature of which, in the season of the floods, descends as low as twenty-two degrees, when the air is at thirty and thirty-three degrees, is an inestimable benefit in a country where the heats are exces

sive during the whole year, and where it is so agreeable to bathe several times in the day. The children pass, as it were, a part of their lives in the water; the whole of the inhabitants, even the women of the most opulent families, know how to swim; and in a country where man is so near the state of nature, one of the first questions asked at meeting in the morning is, whether the water is cooler than on the preceding evening? The mode of bathing is various enough. Humboldt says, "We every evening visited a very respectable society, in the suburb of the Guayquerias. In a fine moon-light night, chairs were placed in the water; the men and women were lightly clothed, as in some baths of the north of Europe; and the family and strangers, assembled in the river, passed some hours in smoking cigars, and in talking, according to the custom of the country, of the extreme dryness of the season, of the abundant rains in the neighbouring districts, and particularly of the luxuries of which the ladies of Cumana accuse those of the Caracas and the Havannah. The company were under no apprehensions from the bavas, or small crocodiles, which are now extremely scarce, and which approach men without attacking them. These animals are three or four feet long. We never met with them in the Manzanares, but with a great number of dolphins, which sometimes ascend the river in

the night, and frighten the bathers by spouting water."

As the inhabitants of Cumana prefer the coolness of the sea-breeze to the appearance of vegetation, they are accustomed to no other walk than that of the open shore. The Spaniards, who are accused in general of no predilection for trees, or the warbling of birds, have transported their prejudices and their habits into the colonies. In Tierra Firme, Mexico, and Peru, it is rare to see a native plant a tree, merely with the view of procuring himself shade; and if we except the environs of the great capitals, walks bordered with trees are almost unknown in these countries.

"I remarked," says Lavaysse, "a very odd custom among the women of Cumana: They wear neither veils nor gloves. Thus, with the most agreeable and expressive shapes and countenances, they have a copper colour. While at Cumana, I offered several pairs of gloves, for herself and daughters, to a lady to whom I was under some obligations. She accepted them, but mentioned that neither she nor her daughters could wear them; that it was not the custom in Cumana; that any young lady seen with gloves and a veil, would be deemed a fantastical coquette, whom no one would marry; and that such fooleries were only fit for the belles and fops of Caracas!"

The inhabitants of Cumana are very polite : it may even be said, that they are excessively

SO.

There is not so much luxury among them as at Caracas: their houses, however, are tolerably well furnished. They are very abstemious. Those dinners and festivals which form one of the charms of society in Europe, and which in the British and French colonies are repeated almost every day from the first of January to the last of December, are unknown to the inhabitants of Cumana, and the other provinces of Caracas.

The Creoles of this city who enter into the career of letters, distinguish themselves by their penetration, judgment, and application. There is not seen exactly the same vivacity of spirit that is perceived in the Creoles of Maracaibo, but those of Cumana are compensated by a larger portion of good sense and solidity.

"The first weeks of our abode at Cumana," says Humboldt, "were employed in verifying our instruments, in herbalizing in the neighbouring fields, and in examining the traces of the earthquake of the 14th of December 1797. Overpowered at once by a great number of objects, we were somewhat embarrassed to lay down a regular plan of study and observation. If every thing around us was fitted to inspire us with the most lively interest, our physical and astronomical instruments in their turns excited strongly the curiosity of the inhabitants. We were distracted by frequent visits; and, in order not to dissatisfy persons

who appeared so happy to see the spots of the moon through Dollond's telescope, the absorption of two gases in a eudiometrical tube, or the effects of galvanism on the motions of a frog, we were obliged to answer questions often obscure, and repeat for whole hours the same experiments.

"These scenes were renewed for the space. of five years, every time that we took up our abode in a place where it was understood that we were in possession of microscopes, telescopes, and electrical apparatus. They were in general so much the more fatiguing, as the person who visited us had confused notions of astronomy and physics; two sciences which, in the Spanish colonies, are designated under the singular name of the new philosophy, "nueva filosophia." The half scientific looked on us with a sort of disdain, when they learnt that we had not brought, in our collection of books, the Spectacle de la Nature by Abbé Pluche, the Cours de Physique of Sigaud la Fond, or the Dictionary of Valmont de Bomare. These three works, and the Traité d'Economie Politique of Baron Bienfeld, are the foreign works most known and esteemed in Spanish America, from Caracas and Chili to Guatimala and the north of Mexico. No one is thought learned, who cannot quote their translations; and it is only in the great capitals, at Lima, at Santa Fé de Bogota, Ii'.

VOL. I.