310 CYCLOPEAN WALLS. 



Muyscas of New Grenada, never appears to have had an/ 

 Bensible influence on the moral state of the nations of 

 (3-uiana. It must be observed further, that in North 

 America, between the Ohio, Miami, and the Lakes, an un- 

 known people, whom systematic authors would make the 

 descendants of the Toltecs and Aztecs, constructed walls of 

 earth and sometimes of stone without mortar,* from ten to 

 fifteen feet high, and seven or eight thousand feet long. 

 These singular circumvallations sometimes enclosed a hun- 

 dred and fifty acres of ground. In the plains of the Orinoco, 

 as in those of Marietta, the Miami, and the Ohio, the centre 

 of an ancient civilization is found in the west on the back of 

 the mountains ; but the Orinoco, and the countries lying be- 

 tween that great river and the Amazon, appear never to 

 have been inhabited by nations whose constructions have re- 

 sisted the ravages of time. Though symbolical figures are 

 found engraved on the hardest rocks, yet further south than 

 eight degrees of latitude, no tumulus, no circumvallation, no 

 dike of earth similar to those that exist farther north in the 

 plains of Varinas and Canagua, has been found. Such is the 

 contrast that may be observed between the eastern parts of 

 North and South America, those parts which extend from the 

 table-land of Cundinamarcaf and the mountains of Cayenne 

 towards the Atlantic, and those which stretch from the Andes 

 of New Spain towards the Alleghanies. Nations advanced in 

 civilization, of which we discover traces on the banks of lake 

 Teguyo and in the Casas grandes of the Bio Grila, might have 

 sent some tribes eastward into the open countries of the 

 Missouri and the Ohio, where the climate differs little from 

 that of New Mexico ; but in South America, where the great 

 flux of nations has continued from north to south, those who 

 had long enjoyed the mild temperature of the back of the 

 equinoctial Cordilleras no doubt dreaded a descent into 

 burning plains bristled with forests, and inundated by the 

 periodical swellings of rivers. It is easy to conceive how 

 much the force of vegetation, and the nature of the soil and 



* Of siliceous limestone, at Pique, on the Great Miami ; of sandstone 

 at Creek Point, ten lesgues from Chillakothe, where the wall is fifteen 

 hundred toises long. 



^ This is the ancient name of the empire of the Zaques, founded by 

 Bochica or Idacanzas, the high priest of Iraca, in New Grenada. 



