Equinoctial Regions of America, vol 3 | Page 7

may be considered as natural pluviometers) is in
proportion to the quantity of water that falls in the different regions.
This quantity, in the centre of the forests of the Upper Orinoco and the
Rio Negro, appeared to me to exceed 90 or 100 inches annually. Such
of the natives, therefore, as have lived beneath the misty sky of the
Esmeralda and the Atabapo, know, without the smallest notion of
natural philosophy, what Eudoxus and Eratosthenes knew heretofore,*
that the inundations of the great rivers are owing solely to the
equatorial rains. (* Strabo lib. 17 page 789. Diod. Sic. lib. l c. 5.) The
following is the usual progress of the oscillations of the Orinoco.
Immediately after the vernal equinox (the people say on the 25th of
March) the commencement of the rising is perceived. It is at first only
an inch in twenty-four hours; sometimes the river again sinks in April;
it attains its maximum in July; remains at the same level from the end
of July till the 25th of August; and then decreases progressively, but
more slowly than it increased. It is at its minimum in January and
February. In both worlds the rivers of the northern torrid zone attain the
greatest height nearly at the same period. The Ganges, the Niger, and
the Gambia reach the maximum, like the Orinoco, in the month of
August.* (* Nearly forty or fifty days after the summer solstice.) The
Nile is two months later, either on account of some local circumstances
in the climate of Abyssinia, or of the length of its course, from the
country of Berber, or 17.5 degrees of latitude, to the bifurcation of the
delta. The Arabian geographers assert that in Sennaar and in Abyssinia
the Nile begins to swell in the month of April (nearly as the Orinoco);
the rise, however, does not become sensible at Cairo till toward the
summer solstice; and the water attains its greatest height at the end of
the month of September.* (* Nearly eighty or ninety days after the
summer solstice.) The river keeps at the same level till the middle of
October; and is at its minimum in April and May, a period when the
rivers of Guiana begin to swell anew. It may be seen from this rapid
statement, that, notwithstanding the retardation caused by the form of
the natural channels, and by local climatic circumstances, the great

phenomenon of the oscillations of the rivers of the torrid zone is
everywhere the same. In the two zodiacs vulgarly called the Tartar and
Chaldean, or Egyptian (in the zodiac which contains the sign of the Rat,
an in that which contains those of the Fishes and Aquarius), particular
constellations are consecrated to the periodical overflowings of the
rivers. Real cycles, divisions of time, have been gradually transformed
into divisions of space; but the generality of the physical phenomena of
the risings seems to prove that the zodiac which has been transmitted to
us by the Greeks, and which, by the precession of the equinoxes,
becomes an historical monument of high antiquity, may have taken
birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred valley of the Nile. In the
zodiacs of the New World--in the Mexican, for instance, of which we
discover the vestiges in the signs of the days, and the periodical series
which they compose--there are also signs of rain and of inundation
corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of
Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of the dodecatemorion. (* The
figure of water itself is often substituted for that of the Rat (Arvicola)
in the Tartar zodiac. The Rat takes the place of Aquarius. Gaubil, Obs.
Mathem. volume 3 page 33.) These two Mexican signs are Water (Atl)
and Cipactli, the sea-monster furnished with 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 (Coxcox) of the Azteks.* (*
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 celebrated among the Scythians and the Thessalians. As the
Tartarian and Mexican