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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In The Sciences, In Order To Distinguish Truth From Error,
It Often Suffices To Retrace The History Of Opinions, And To Follow
Their Successive Developments.
The discussion to which I shall devote
the end of this chapter is important, not only because it throws
Light
on the events of the Conquest, and that long series of disastrous
expeditions made in search of El Dorado, the last of which was in the
year 1775; it also furnishes, in addition to this simply historical
interest, another, more substantial and more generally felt, that of
rectifying the geography of South America, and of disembarrassing the
maps published in our days of those great lakes, and that strange
labyrinth of rivers, placed as if by chance between sixty and
sixty-six degrees of longitude. No man in Europe believes any longer
in the wealth of Guiana and the empire of the Grand Patiti. The town
of Manoa and its palaces covered with plates of massy gold have long
since disappeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the
fable of El Dorado, the lake Parima, which, similar to the lake of
Mexico, reflected the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been
religiously preserved by geographers. In the space of three centuries,
the same traditions have been differently modified; from ignorance of
the American languages, rivers have been taken for lakes, and portages
for branches of rivers; one lake, the Cassipa, has been made to
advance five degrees of latitude toward the south, while another, the
Parima or Dorado, has been transported the distance of a hundred
leagues from the western to the eastern bank of the Rio Branco.
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