Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Migration Of Nations In The Ancient World Was From East To
West; The Basques Or Iberians, The Celts, The Germans And The Pelasgi,
Appeared In Succession.
In the New World similar migrations flowed
from north to south.
Among the nations that inhabit the two
hemispheres, the direction of this movement followed that of the
mountains; but in the torrid zone the temperate table-lands of the
Cordilleras had greater influence on the destiny of mankind, than the
mountains of Asia and central Europe. As, properly speaking, only
civilized nations have a history, the history of the Americans is
necessarily no more than that of a small portion of the inhabitants of
the mountains. Profound obscurity envelops the vast country which
stretches from the eastern slope of the Cordilleras towards the
Atlantic; and for this very reason, whatever in that country relates
to the preponderance of one nation over others, to distant migrations,
to the physiognomical features which denote a foreign race, excite our
deepest interest.
Amidst the plains of North America, some powerful nation, which has
disappeared, constructed circular, square, and octagonal
fortifications; walls six thousand toises in length; tumuli from seven
to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in
height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing
thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less
slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those
countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the
Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of
Kentucky.
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