Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Appears, That, Accustomed
During The Day To An Extreme Brilliancy Of Light, The Sensitive And
Other Leguminous Plants With
Thin and delicate leaves are affected
in the evening by the smallest decline in the intensity of the
sun's rays;
So that for vegetation, night begins there, as with us,
before the total disappearance of the solar disk. But why, in a
zone where there is scarcely any twilight, do not the first rays of
the sun stimulate the leaves with the more strength, as the absence
of light must have rendered them more susceptible? Does the
humidity deposited on the parenchyma by the cooling of the leaves,
which is the effect of the nocturnal radiation, prevent the action
of the first rays of the sun? In our climates, the leguminous
plants with irritable leaves awake during the twilight of the
morning, before the sun appears.
CHAPTER 1.9.
PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION AND MANNERS OF THE CHAYMAS.
THEIR LANGUAGE.
FILIATION OF THE NATIONS WHICH INHABIT NEW ANDALUCIA.
PARIAGOTOS SEEN BY COLUMBUS.
I did not wish to mingle with the narrative of our journey to the
Missions of Caripe any general considerations on the different
tribes of the indigenous inhabitants of New Andalusia; their
manners, their languages, and their common origin. Having returned
to the spot whence we set out, I shall now bring into one point of
view these considerations which are so nearly connected with the
history of the human race. As we advance into the interior of the
country, these subjects will become even more interesting than the
phenomena of the physical world. The north-east part of equinoctial
America, Terra Firma, and the banks of the Orinoco, resemble in
respect to the numerous races of people who inhabit them, the
defiles of the Caucasus, the mountains of Hindookho, at the
northern extremity of Asia, beyond the Tungouses, and the Tartare
settled at the mouth of the Lena. The barbarism which prevails
throughout these different regions is perhaps less owing to a
primitive absence of all kind of civilization, than to the effects
of long degradation; for most of the hordes which we designate
under the name of savages, are probably the descendants of nations
highly advanced in cultivation. How can we distinguish the
prolonged infancy of the human race (if, indeed, it anywhere
exists), from that state of moral degradation in which solitude,
want, compulsory misery, forced migration, or rigour of climate,
obliterate even the traces of civilization? If everything connected
with the primitive state of man, and the first population of a
continent, could from its nature belong to the domain of history,
we might appeal to the traditions of India. According to the
opinion frequently expressed in the laws of Menou and in the
Ramajan, savages were regarded as tribes banished from civilized
society, and driven into the forests. The word barbarian, which we
have borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, was possibly merely the
proper name of one of those rude hordes.
In the New World, at the beginning of the conquest, the natives
were collected into large societies only on the ridge of the
Cordilleras and the coasts opposite to Asia.
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