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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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.
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