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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They Strike The Imagination
Of The Vulgar; As Order Everywhere Astonishes, When We Cannot Easily
Ascend To First Causes.
Rivers that belong entirely to the torrid zone
display in their periodical movements that wonderful regularity which
is peculiar
To a region where the same wind brings almost always
strata of air of the same temperature; and where the change of the sun
in its declination causes every year at the same period a rupture of
equilibrium in the electric intensity, in the cessation of the
breezes, and the commencement of the season of rains. The Orinoco, the
Rio Magdalena, and the Congo or Zaire are the only great rivers of the
equinoctial region of the globe, which, rising near the equator, have
their mouths in a much higher latitude, though still within the
tropics. The Nile and the Rio de la Plata direct their course, in the
two opposite hemispheres, from the torrid zone towards the temperate.*
(* In Asia, the Ganges, the Burrampooter, and the majestic rivers of
Indo-China direct their course towards the equator. The former flow
from the temperate to the torrid zone. This circumstance of courses
pursuing opposite directions (towards the equator, and towards the
temperate climates) has an influence on the period and the height of
the risings, on the nature and variety of the productions on the banks
of the rivers, on the less or greater activity of trade; and, I may
add, from what we know of the nations of Egypt, Merce, and India, on
the progress of civilization along the valleys of the rivers.)
As long as, confounding the Rio Paragua of Esmeralda with the Rio
Guaviare, the sources of the Orinoco were sought towards the
south-west, on the eastern back of the Andes, the risings of this
river were attributed to a periodical melting of the snows. This
reasoning was as far from the truth as that in which the Nile was
formerly supposed to be swelled by the waters of the snows of
Abyssinia. The Cordilleras of New Grenada, near which the western
tributary streams of the Orinoco, the Guaviare, the Meta, and the
Apure take their rise, enter no more into the limit of perpetual
snows, with the sole exception of the Paramos of Chita and Mucuchies,
than the Alps of Abyssinia. Snowy mountains are much more rare in the
torrid zone than is generally admitted; and the melting of the snows,
which is not copious there at any season, does not at all increase at
the time of the inundations of the Orinoco.
The cause of the periodical swellings of the Orinoco acts equally on
all the rivers that take rise in the torrid zone. After the vernal
equinox, the cessation of the breezes announces the season of rains.
The increase of the rivers (which may be considered as natural
pluviometers) is in proportion to the quantity of water that falls in
the different regions. This quantity, in the centre of the forests of
the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, appeared to me to exceed 90 or
100 inches annually. Such of the natives, therefore, as have lived
beneath the misty sky of the Esmeralda and the Atabapo, know, without
the smallest notion of natural philosophy, what Eudoxus and
Eratosthenes knew heretofore,* that the inundations of the great
rivers are owing solely to the equatorial rains. (* Strabo lib. 17
page 789. Diod. Sic. lib. l c. 5.) The following is the usual progress
of the oscillations of the Orinoco. Immediately after the vernal
equinox (the people say on the 25th of March) the commencement of the
rising is perceived. It is at first only an inch in twenty-four hours;
sometimes the river again sinks in April; it attains its maximum in
July; remains at the same level from the end of July till the 25th of
August; and then decreases progressively, but more slowly than it
increased. It is at its minimum in January and February. In both
worlds the rivers of the northern torrid zone attain the greatest
height nearly at the same period. The Ganges, the Niger, and the
Gambia reach the maximum, like the Orinoco, in the month of August.*
(* Nearly forty or fifty days after the summer solstice.) The Nile is
two months later, either on account of some local circumstances in the
climate of Abyssinia, or of the length of its course, from the country
of Berber, or 17.5 degrees of latitude, to the bifurcation of the
delta. The Arabian geographers assert that in Sennaar and in Abyssinia
the Nile begins to swell in the month of April (nearly as the
Orinoco); the rise, however, does not become sensible at Cairo till
toward the summer solstice; and the water attains its greatest height
at the end of the month of September.* (* Nearly eighty or ninety days
after the summer solstice.) The river keeps at the same level till the
middle of October; and is at its minimum in April and May, a period
when the rivers of Guiana begin to swell anew. It may be seen from
this rapid statement, that, notwithstanding the retardation caused by
the form of the natural channels, and by local climatic circumstances,
the great phenomenon of the oscillations of the rivers of the torrid
zone is everywhere the same. In the two zodiacs vulgarly called the
Tartar and Chaldean, or Egyptian (in the zodiac which contains the
sign of the Rat, an in that which contains those of the Fishes and
Aquarius), particular constellations are consecrated to the periodical
overflowings of the rivers. Real cycles, divisions of time, have been
gradually transformed into divisions of space; but the generality of
the physical phenomena of the risings seems to prove that the zodiac
which has been transmitted to us by the Greeks, and which, by the
precession of the equinoxes, becomes an historical monument of high
antiquity, may have taken birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred
valley of the Nile. In the zodiacs of the New World - in the Mexican,
for instance, of which we discover the vestiges in the signs of the
days, and the periodical series which they compose - there are also
signs of rain and of inundation corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the
Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of
the dodecatemorion.
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