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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I Attribute
This Air Of Family Resemblance To Two Different Causes, The Local
Situation Of The Indian Tribes, And Their Inferior Degree Of
Intellectual Culture.
Savage nations are subdivided into an
infinity of tribes, which, bearing violent hatred one to another,
form no intermarriages, even when their languages spring from the
same root, and when only a small arm of a river, or a group of
hills, separates their habitations.
The less numerous the tribes,
the more the intermarriages repeated for ages between the same
families tend to fix a certain similarity of conformation, an
organic type, which may be called national. This type is preserved
under the system of the Missions, each Mission being formed by a
single horde, and marriages being contracted only between the
inhabitants of the same hamlet. Those ties of blood which unite
almost a whole nation, are indicated in a simple manner in the
language of the Indians born in the Missions, or by those who,
after having been taken from the woods, have learned Spanish. To
designate the individuals who belong to the same tribe, they employ
the expression mis parientes, my relations.
With these causes, common to all isolated classes, and the effects
of which are observable among the Jews of Europe, among the
different castes of India, and among mountain nations in general,
are combined some other causes hitherto unnoticed. I have observed
elsewhere, that it is intellectual culture which most contributes
to diversify the features. Barbarous nations have a physiognomy of
tribe or of horde, rather than individuality of look or features.
The savage and civilized man are like those animals of an
individual species, some of which roam in the forest, while others,
associated with mankind, share the benefits and evils which
accompany civilization.
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