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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Is Then This River, Which
Appears To Us So Grand And So Majestic, Only The Feeble Remains Of
Those Immense Currents Of Fresh Water Which Heretofore Traversed The
Country At The East Of The Andes, Like Arms Of Inland Seas?
What must
have been the state of those low countries of Guiana that now undergo
the effects of annual inundations?
What immense numbers of crocodiles,
manatees, and boas must have inhabited these vast spaces of land,
converted alternately into marshes of stagnant water, and into barren
and fissured plains! The more peaceful world which we inhabit has then
succeeded to a world of tumult. The bones of mastodons and American
elephants are found dispersed on the table-lands of the Andes. The
megatherium inhabited the plains of Uruguay. On digging deep into the
ground, in high valleys, where neither palm-trees nor arborescent
ferns can grow, strata of coal are discovered, that still show
vestiges of gigantic monocotyledonous plants.
There was a remote period then, in which the classes of plants were
otherwise distributed, when the animals were larger, and the rivers
broader and of greater depth. There end those records of nature, that
it is in our power to consult. We are ignorant whether the human race,
which at the time of the discovery of America scarcely formed a few
feeble tribes on the east of the Cordilleras, had already descended
into the plains; or whether the ancient tradition of the great waters,
which is found among the nations of the Orinoco, the Erevato, and the
Caura, belong to other climates, whence it has been propagated to this
part of the New Continent.
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