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 Cannot
Doubt, That The Physical Aspect Of Greece, Intersected By Small Chains
Of Mountains, And Mediterranean Gulfs, Contributed, At The Dawn Of
Civilization, To The Intellectual Development Of The Greeks.
But the
operation of this influence of climate, and of the configuration of
the soil, is felt in all its force only among a race of men who,
endowed with a happy organization of the mental faculties, are
susceptible of exterior impulse.
In studying the history of our
species, we see, at certain distances, these foci of ancient
civilization dispersed over the globe like luminous points; and we are
struck by the inequality of improvement in nations inhabiting
analogous climates, and whose native soil appears equally favoured by
the most precious gifts of nature.
Since my departure from the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, a new
era has unfolded itself in the social state of the nations of the
West. The fury of civil discussions has been succeeded by the
blessings of peace, and a freer development of the arts of industry.
The bifurcations of the Orinoco, the isthmus of Tuamini, so easy to be
made passable by an artificial canal, will ere long fix the attention
of commercial Europe. The Cassiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the
course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no
longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers
which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square
leagues. The grain of New Grenada will be carried to the banks of the
Rio Negro; boats will descend from the sources of the Napo and the
Ucuyabe, from the Andes of Quito and of Upper Peru, to the mouths of
the Orinoco, a distance which equals that from Timbuctoo to
Marseilles.
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