Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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He Talked Of Those Places With That Enthusiasm Which Is
Felt In All The Colonies Of South America For Everything Far Off.
The assemblage of Indians at Pararuma again excited in us that
interest, which everywhere attaches man in a cultivated state to the
study of man in a savage condition, and the successive development of
his intellectual faculties.
How difficult to recognize in this infancy
of society, in this assemblage of dull, silent, inanimate Indians, the
primitive character of our species! Human nature does not here
manifest those features of artless simplicity, of which poets in every
language have drawn such enchanting pictures. The savage of the
Orinoco appeared to us to be as hideous as the savage of the
Mississippi, described by that philosophical traveller Volney, who so
well knew how to paint man in different climates. We are eager to
persuade ourselves that these natives, crouching before the fire, or
seated on large turtle-shells, their bodies covered with earth and
grease, their eyes stupidly fixed for whole hours on the beverage they
are preparing, far from being the primitive type of our species, are a
degenerate race, the feeble remains of nations who, after having been
long dispersed in the forests, are replunged into barbarism.
Red paint being in some sort the only clothing of the Indians, two
kinds may be distinguished among them, according as they are more or
less affluent. The common decoration of the Caribs, the Ottomacs, and
the Jaruros, is onoto,* (* Properly anoto.
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