EZ8EMBLANCE OI" THE ANCIENT LEGENDS. 13 



a horn. This animal is at once the Antelope-fish of the 

 Hindoos, the Capricorn of our zodiac, the Deucalion of the 

 Greeks, and the Noah CCoxcox) of the Azteks.* Thus we 

 find the general results of comparative hydrography in the 

 astrological monuments, the divisions of time, and the reli- 

 gious traditions of nations the most remote from each other 

 in their situation and in their degree of intellectual 

 advancement. 



As the equatorial rains take place in the flat country 

 when the sun passes through the zenith of the place, that 

 is, when its declination becomes homonymous with the zone 

 comprised between the equator and one of the tropics, the 

 waters of the Amazon sink, while those of the Orinoco rise 

 perceptibly. In a very judicious discussion on the origin of 

 the Rio Congo,t the attention of philosophers has been 

 already called to the modifications which the periods of the 

 risings must undergo in the course of a river, the sources 

 and the mouth of which are not on the* same side of the 

 equinoctial line.J The hydraulic systems of the Orinoco 

 and the Amazon furnish a combination of circumstances still 

 more extraordinary. They are united by the Rio Negro and 

 the Cassiquiare, a branch of the Orinoco ; it is a navigable 



* Coxcox bears also the denomination of Teo-Cipactli, in which the 

 root god or divine is added to the name of the sign Cipactli. It is the 

 man of the Fourth Age ; who, at the fourth destruction of the world (the 

 last renovation of nature), saved himself with his wife, and reached the 

 mountain of Colhuacan. According to the commentator Germanicus, 

 Deucalion was placed in Aquarius ; but the three signs of the Fishes, 

 Aquarius, and Capricorn (the Antelope-fish), were heretofore intimately 

 linked together. The animal, which, after having long inhabited the 

 waters, takes the form of an antelope, and climbs the mountains, reminds 

 people, whose restless imagination seizes the most remote similitudes, of 

 the ancient traditions of Menou, of Noah, and of those Deucalions cele- 

 brated among the Scythians and the Thessalians. As the Tartarian 

 and Mexican zodiacs contain the signs of the Monkey and the T^iyer, 

 they, no doubt, originated in the torrid zone. With the Muyscas, inha- 

 bitants of New Grenada, the first sign, as in eastern Asia, was that of 

 water, figured by a Frog It is also remarkable, that the astrological 

 worship of the Muyscas came to the table-land of Bogota from the 

 eastern side, from the plains of San Juan, which extend toward the 

 Guaviare and the Orinoco. 



t Voyage to the Zaire, p. xvii. 



t Among the rivers of America thia it the case with the Rio Neirro 

 tLe Rio IJrauco. and the Jupura. 



