Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 158 of 208 - First - Home
Or Did They Come From The South By The Rio Topayos,
Which Descends From The Vast Table-Land Of The
Campos Parecis?
Superstition attaches great importance to these mineral substances:
they are worn suspended from the neck as amulets, because,
According
to popular belief, they preserve the wearer from nervous complaints,
fevers, and the stings of venomous serpents. They have consequently
been for ages an article of trade among the natives, both north and
south of the Orinoco. The Caribs, who may be considered as the
Bucharians of the New World, made them known along the coasts of
Guiana; and the same stones, like money in circulation, passed
successively from nation to nation in opposite directions: their
quantity is perhaps not augmented, and the spot which produces them is
probably unknown rather than concealed. In the midst of enlightened
Europe, on occasion of a warm contest respecting native bark, a few
years ago, the green stones of the Orinoco were gravely proposed as a
powerful febrifuge. After this appeal to the credulity of Europeans,
we cannot be surprised to learn that the Spanish planters share the
predilection of the Indians for these amulets, and that they are sold
at a very considerable price. The form given to them most frequently
is that of the Babylonian cylinders,* longitudinally perforated, and
loaded with inscriptions and figures. (The price of a cylinder two
inches long is from twelve to fifteen piastres.) But this is not the
work of the Indians of our days, the natives of the Orinoco and the
Amazon, whom we find in the last degree of barbarism. The Amazon
stones, like the perforated and sculptured emeralds, found in the
Cordilleras of New Grenada and Quito, are vestiges of anterior
civilization. The present inhabitants of those countries, particularly
in the hot region, so little comprehend the possibility of cutting
hard stones (the emerald, jade, compact feldspar and rock-crystal),
that they imagine the green stone is soft when taken out of the earth,
and that it hardens after having been moulded by the hand.
The natural soil of the Amazon-stone is not in the valley of the river
Amazon. It does not derive its name from the river, but like the river
itself, the stone has been named after a nation of warlike women, whom
Father Acunha, and Oviedo, in his letter to cardinal Bembo, compare to
the Amazons of the ancient world. What we see in our cabinets under
the false denomination of Amazon-stone, is neither jade, nor compact
feldspar, but a common feldspar of an apple-green colour, that comes
from the Ural mountains and on lake Onega in Russia, but which I never
saw in the granitic mountains of Guiana. Sometimes also this very rare
and hard Amazon-stone is confounded with the hatchet-nephrite
(beilstein)* of Werner, which has much less tenacity. (* Punamustein
(jade axinien). The stone hatchets found in America, for instance in
Mexico, are not of beilstein, but of compact feldspar.) The substance
which I obtained from the hands of the Indians, belongs to the
saussurite,* (* Jade of Saussure, according to the system of
Brongniart; tenacious jade, and compact tenacious feldspar of Hauy;
some varieties of the variolithe of Werner.) to the real jade, which
resembles compact feldspar, and which forms one of the constituent
parts of the verde de Corsica, or gabbro.* (* Euphotide of Hauy, or
schillerfels, of Raumer.) It takes a fine polish, and passes from
apple-green to emerald-green; it is translucent at the edges,
extremely tenacious, and in a high degree sonorous. These Amazon
stones were formerly cut by the natives into very thin plates,
perforated at the centre, and suspended by a thread, and these plates
yield an almost metallic sound if struck by another hard body.* (* M.
Brongniart, to whom I showed these plates on my return to Europe, very
justly compared these jades of Parime to the sonorous stones employed
by the Chinese in their musical instruments called king.) This fact
confirms the connection which we find, notwithstanding the difference
of fracture and of specific gravity between the saussurite and the
siliceous basis of the porphyrschiefer, which is the phonolite
(klingstein). I have already observed, that, as it is very rare to
find in America nephrite, jade, or compact feldspar, in its native
place, we may well be astonished at the quantity of hatchets which are
everywhere discovered in digging the earth, from the banks of the Ohio
as far as Chile. We saw in the mountains of Upper Orinoco, or of
Parime, only granular granites containing a little hornblende,
granites passing into gneiss, and schistoid hornblendes. Has nature
repeated on the east of Esmeralda, between the sources of the Carony,
the Essequibo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Branco, the
transition-formation of Tucutunemo reposing on mica-schist? Does the
Amazon-stone come from the rocks of euphotide, which form the last
member of the series of primitive rocks?
We find among the inhabitants of both hemispheres, at the first dawn
of civilization, a peculiar predilection for certain stones; not only
those which, from their hardness, may be useful to man as cutting
instruments, but also for mineral substances, which, on account of
their colour and their natural form, are believed to bear some
relation to the organic functions, and even to the propensities of the
soul. This ancient worship of stones, these benign virtues attributed
to jade and haematite, belong to the savages of America as well as to
the inhabitants of the forests of Thrace. The human race, when in an
uncultivated state, believes itself to have sprung from the ground;
and feels as if it were enchained to the earth, and the substances
contained in her bosom. The powers of nature, and still more those
which destroy than those which preserve, are the first objects of its
worship. It is not solely in the tempest, in the sound that precedes
the earthquake, in the fire that feeds the volcano, that these powers
are manifested; the inanimate rock; stones, by their lustre and
hardness; mountains, by their mass and their solitude; act upon the
untaught mind with a force which, in a state of advanced civilization,
can no longer be conceived.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 158 of 208
Words from 160195 to 161232
of 211397