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 296 of 406 - First - Home
From What We Know Of The
Equilibrium Of The Seas, I Cannot Think That The New World Issued From
The
Waters later than the Old, and that organic life is there younger,
or more recent; but without admitting oppositions between
The two
hemispheres of the same planet, we may conceive that in the hemisphere
most abundant in waters the different systems of rivers required more
time to separate themselves from one another, and establish their
complete independence. The deposits of mud, which are formed wherever
the running waters lose somewhat of their swiftness, contribute, no
doubt, to raise the beds of the great confluent streams, and augment
their inundations; but at length these deposits entirely obstruct the
branches of the rivers and the narrow channels that connect the
neighbouring streams. The substances washed down by rain-waters form
by their accumulation new bars, isthmuses of deposited earth, and
points of division that did not before exist. It hence results that
these natural channels of communication are by degrees divided into
two tributary streams, and from the effect of a transverse rising,
acquire two opposite slopes; a part of their waters is turned back
towards the principal recipient, and a buttress rises between the two
parallel basins, which occasions all traces of their ancient
communication to disappear. From this period the bifurcations no
longer connect different systems of rivers; and, where they continue
to take place at the time of great inundations, we see that the waters
diverge from the principal recipient only to enter it again after a
longer or shorter circuit. The limits, which at first appeared vague
and uncertain, begin to be fixed; and in the lapse of ages, from the
action of whatever is moveable on the surface of the globe, from that
of the waters, the deposits, and the sands, the basins of rivers
separate, as great lakes are subdivided, and as inland seas lose their
ancient communications.* (* The geological constitution of the soil
seems to indicate that, notwithstanding the actual difference of level
in their waters, the Black Sea, the Caspian, and lake Aral,
communicated with each other in an era anterior to historic times. The
overflowing of the Aral into the Caspian Sea seems even to be partly
of a more recent date, and independent of the bifurcation of the Gihon
(Oxus), on which one of the most learned geographers of our day, M.
Ritter, has thrown new light.)
The certainty acquired by geographers since the sixteenth century, of
the existence of several bifurcations, and the mutual dependence of
various systems of rivers in South America, have led them to admit an
intimate connection between the five great tributary streams of the
Orinoco and the Amazon; the Guaviare, the Inirida, the Rio Negro, the
Caqueta or Hyapura, and the Putumayo or Iza.
The Meta, the Guaviare, the Caqueta, and the Putumayo, are the only
great rivers that rise immediately from the eastern declivity of the
Andes of Santa Fe, Popayan, and Pasto. The Vichada, the Zama, the
Inirida, the Rio Negro, the Uaupe, and the Apoporis, which are marked
in our maps as extending westward as far as the mountains, take rise
at a great distance from them, either in the savannahs between the
Meta and the Guaviare, or in the mountainous country which, according
to the information given me by the natives, begins at four or five
days' journey westward of the missions of Javita and Maroa, and
extends through the Sierra Tuhuny, beyond the Xie, towards the banks
of the Issana.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 296 of 406
Words from 153574 to 154162
of 211397