Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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When The Natives Are Asked
How Those Figures Could Have Been Sculptured, They Answer With A
Smile, As If Relating A Fact Of Which Only A White Man Could Be
Ignorant, That "At The Period Of The Great Waters, Their Fathers Went
To That Height In Boats."
These ancient traditions of the human race, which we find dispersed
over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast
shipwreck, are highly interesting in the philosophical study of our
own species.
Like certain families of the vegetable kingdom, which,
notwithstanding the diversity of climates and the influence of
heights, retain the impression of a common type, the traditions of
nations respecting the origin of the world, display everywhere the
same physiognomy, and preserve features of resemblance that fill us
with astonishment. How many different tongues, belonging to branches
that appear totally distinct, transmit to us the same facts! The
traditions concerning races that have been destroyed, and the renewal
of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every nation gives them a
local colouring. In the great continents, as in the smallest islands
of the Pacific Ocean, it is always on the loftiest and nearest
mountain that the remains of the human race have been saved; and this
event appears the more recent, in proportion as the nations are
uncultivated, and as the knowledge they have of their own existence
has no very remote date. After having studied with attention the
Mexican monuments anterior to the discovery of the New World; after
having penetrated into the forests of the Orinoco, and observed the
diminutive size of the European establishments, their solitude, and
the state of the tribes that have remained independent; we cannot
allow ourselves to attribute the analogies just cited to the influence
exercised by the missionaries, and by Christianity, on the national
traditions.
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