We Must Also Admit On This Notion (And
This Perhaps Is A Greater Difficulty) That Man Has Inhabited
South America For An Immensely Long Period, Inasmuch As
Any Change Of Climate Effected By The Elevation Of The Land
Must Have Been Extremely Gradual.
At Valparaiso, within
the last 220 years, the rise has been somewhat less than 19
feet:
At Lima a sea-beach has certainly been upheaved from
80 to 90 feet, within the Indo-human period: but such small
elevations could have had little power in deflecting the
moisture-bringing atmospheric currents. Dr. Lund, however,
found human skeletons in the caves of Brazil, the appearance
of which induced him to believe that the Indian race has
existed during a vast lapse of time in South America.
When at Lima, I conversed on these subjects [3] with Mr.
Gill, a civil engineer, who had seen much of the interior
country. He told me that a conjecture of a change of climate
had sometimes crossed his mind; but that he thought
that the greater portion of land, now incapable of cultivation,
but covered with Indian ruins, had been reduced to this state
by the water-conduits, which the Indians formerly constructed
on so wonderful a scale, having been injured by
neglect and by subterranean movements. I may here mention,
that the Peruvians actually carried their irrigating
streams in tunnels through hills of solid rock. Mr. Gill told
me, he had been employed professionally to examine one:
he found the passage low, narrow, crooked, and not of uniform
breadth, but of very considerable length.
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