Note 66 — Chapter X · THE AMAZON.

Since my departure from the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, a new era unfolds itself in the social state of the nations of the West. The fury of civil discussions will be succeeded by the blessings of peace and a freer development of the arts of industry. The bifurcation of the Orinoco, the isthmus of Tuamini, so easy to pass over by an artificial canal, will fix the attention of commercial Europe. The Cassiquiari—as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length—will no longer form in vain a navigable canal between two basins of rivers, which have a surface of 190,000 square leagues. The grain of New Grenada will be carried to the banks of the Rio Negro; boats will descend from the sources of the Napo and the Ucayali, from the Andes of Quito and upper Peru, to the mouths of the Orinoco—a distance which equals that from Timbuctoo to Marseilles. A country nine or ten times larger than Spain, and enriched with the most varied productions, is navigable in every direction by the medium of the natural canal of the Cassiquiari and the bifurcation of the rivers. This phenomenon, which one day will be so important for the political connexions of nations, unquestionably deserves to be carefully examined.—Humboldt.