TRADITION OR THE AMAZONS, 
399 
Amazon and the Orinoco from the Mexican table-land ; 
although history records no fact that connects the savage 
nations of Guiana with the civilized nations of Anahuac, the 
monk Bernard de Sahagun, at the beginning of the conquest, 
found preserved as relies at Cholula, certain green stones 
which had belonged to Quetzalcohuatl. This mysterious per- 
sonage is the Mexican Buddha ; he appeared in the time of the 
Toltecs, founded the first religious associations, and estab- 
lished a government similar to that of Meroii and ot Japan. 
The history of the jade, or the green stones of Guiana, is 
intimately connected with that of the warlike women whom 
the travellers of the sixteenth century named the Amazons 
of the New World. La, Condamine has produced many 
testimonies in favour of this tradition. Since my return 
from the Orinoco and the river Amazon, I have often been 
asked, at Paris, whether I embraced the opinion of that 
learned man, or believed, like several of his contemporaries, 
that he undertook the defence of the Cougnantainsecouiiha, 
(the independent women who received men int o their society 
only in the month of April), merely to fix, in a public 
sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience some- 
what eager for novelties. I may take this opportunity of 
expressing my opinion on a tradition which has so romantic 
an appearance ; and I am farther led to do this as La Conda- 
mine asserts that the Amazons of the Bio Oayame* crossed 
* Orellana, arriving at the Maraflon by the Rio Coca and the Napo, 
fought with the Amazons, as it appears, between the mouth of the Rio 
Negro and that of the Xingu. La Condamine asserts, that in the 
seventeenth century they passed ttie Maraflon between Tcfe and the 
mouth of the Rio Puruz, near the Cuflo Cuchivara, which is a western 
branch of the Puruz. These women therefore came from the hanks of 
tbe Rio Cayame, or Cayambc, consequently from the unknown country 
which extends south of the Maraflon, between the Ueayale and the 
Madeira. Raleigh also places them on the south of the Maraflon. but in 
the province of Topayos, and on the river of the same name. Ife says 
they were “ rich in golden vessels, which they had acquired in exchange 
for the famous green stones, or jnedras hijadas.” (Raleigh means, no 
doubt, pieilras "riel higado , stones that cure diseases of the liver.) It is 
remarkable enough, that, one hundred and forty-eight years after, La 
Condamine still found those green stones {divine stones ), which difler 
neither in colour nor in hardness from oriental jade, in greater numbers 
among tlie Indians who live near the mouth of the Rio Topayos, than 
elsewhere. The Indians said that they inherited these stones, which curs 
