486 
ANTIQUITY Or RACES. 
It was one of those calm and serene nights whicn are so 
co -mon in the torrid zone. The stars shone with a mud 
and planetary light. Their scintillation was scarcely sen- 
sible at the horizon, which seemed illumined by the great 
nebulae of the southern hemisphere. An innumerable mul- 
titude of insects spread a reddish light upon the ground, 
loaded with plants, and resplendent with these living and 
moving fires, as if the stars of the firmament had sunk 
down on the savannah. On quitting the cavern we stopped 
several times to admire the beauty of this singular scene. 
The odoriferous vanilla and festoons of bignonia decorated 
the entrance ; and above, on the summit of the hill, the 
arrowy branches of tfie palm-trees waved murmuring m 
the air. We descended towards the river, to take the 
road to the mission, where we arrived late in the night. 
Our imagination was struck by all we had just seen. 
Occupied continually by the present, in a coiuitry where 
the traveller is tempteA to regard human society as a new 
institution, he is more powerfully interested by remem- 
brances of times past. These remembrances were not 
indeed of a distant date ; but in all that is monumental 
antiquity is a relative idea, and we easily confound what 
is ancient with what is obscure and problematic. The 
Egyptians considered the historical remembrances of the 
Greeks as very recent. If the Chinese, or, as they prefer 
calling themselves, the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, 
could have communicated with the priests of Heliopolis, 
they would have smiled at those pretensions of the Egyp- 
tians to antiquity. Contrasts not less striking are found 
in the north of Europe and of Asia, in the New World, 
and in every region where the human race lias not pre- 
served a long consciousness of itself. The migration of 
the Toltecs, the most ancient historical event on the table- 
land of Mexico, dates only in the sixth century of our 
era. The introduction of a good system of intercalation, 
and the reform of the calendars, the indispensable basis of 
an accurate chronology, took place in the year 1091. These 
epochs, which to us appear so modern, fall on fabulous 
times, when we reflect on the history of our species between 
the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon. TV e there see 
■symbolic figures sculptured on the rocks, but nc tradition 
