The letters of Dr. Joseph Hooker published during the present year (1849) in the Athenæum (pp. 431 and 1039) may also be consulted with advantage.
[11]. p. 5—“A tawny tribe of Herdsmen.”
The Hiongnu (Hioung-nou), whom Deguignes and with him many other historians long believed to be identical with the Huns, inhabited the vast Tartarian tract of land which is bordered on the east by Uo-leang-ho, the present territory of the Mant-schu, on the south by the Chinese wall, on the west by the U-siün, and on the north by the land of the Eleuthes But the Hiongnu belong to the Turkish, and the Huns to the Finnish or Uralian race. The northern Huns, a rude people of herdsmen, unacquainted with agriculture, were of a blackish brown complexion. The southern Huns, or Hajatehah called by the Byzantines Euthalites or Nephthalites, and inhabiting the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, had fairer skins. These pursued agriculture, and dwelt in towns. They are frequently termed White Huns, and d’Herbelot even regards them as Indo-Scythians. In Deguignes[[CN]] an account will be found of the Punu, the leader or Tanju of the Huns, and of the great drought and famine which led to the migration of a portion of the nation northwards about the year 46 A.D. All the details, given in his celebrated work regarding the Hiongnu, have been recently submitted by Klaproth to a rigid and learned scrutiny. From the result of his investigations it would appear, that the Hiongnu belong to the widely diffused Turkish races of the Altai and Tangnu mountain districts. The name of Hiongnu was a general name for the Ti, Thu-kiu or Turks, in the north and north-west of China, even in the third century before the Christian era. The southern Hiongnu submitted themselves to the Chinese, and in conjunction with the latter destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu, who were in consequence compelled to flee to the west, and thus appear to have given the first impulse to the migration of nations in Central Asia. The Huns, who were long confounded with the Hiongnu (as the Uigures were with the Ugures and Hungarians) belonged, according to Klaproth,[[CO]] to the Finnish race of the Uralian mountains, which race has been variously intermixed with Germans, Turks, and Samoiedes.
The Huns (Οὖννοι) are first mentioned by Dionysius Periegetes, a writer who was able to obtain more accurate information than others regarding the interior of Asia, because, as a learned man and a native of Charax on the Arabian Gulf, he was sent back to the East by Augustus, to accompany thither his adopted son, Caius Agrippa. Ptolemy, a century later, writes the word Χοῦνοι with a strong aspiration, which, as St. Martin observes, is again met with in the geographical name of Chunigard.
[12]. p. 6—“No hewn stone.”
Representations of the sun and figures of animals have certainly been found graven in rocks on the banks of the Orinoco, near Caicara, where the woody region borders on the plain, but in the Llanos themselves not a trace of these rough memorials of earlier inhabitants has ever been discovered. It is to be regretted that no accurate account has reached us of a monument which was sent to Count Maurepas, in France, and which, according to Kalm, was discovered in the prairies of Canada, 900 French leagues (about 2700 English miles) west of Montreal, by M. de Verandrier, while engaged on an expedition to the coast of the Pacific Ocean.[[CP]] This traveller met in the plains with huge masses of stone erected by the hand of man, on one of which there was an inscription believed to be in the Tartar language[[CQ]]. How can so important a monument have remained uninvestigated? Can it actually have borne an alphabetical inscription, or are we not rather to believe that it must have been an historical picture, like the so-called Phœnician inscription, which has been discovered on the bank of the Taunton river, and whose authenticity has been questioned by Court de Gebelin? I indeed regard it as highly probable that these plains were once traversed by civilised nations, and it seems to me that this fact is proved by the existence of pyramidal grave-works or burrows and bulwarks of extraordinary length, between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanys, on which Squier and Davis have now thrown new light in their account of the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley.[[CR]] M. de Verandrier was despatched, about the year 1746, on this expedition by the Chevalier de Beauharnois, Governor-General of Canada; and several Jesuits in Quebec assured Kalm that they had actually had this so-called inscription in their hands, and that it was graven on a small tablet which was found inlaid in a hewn pillar. I have in vain requested several of my friends in France to make inquiries regarding this monument, in the event of its being in the Collection of Count Maurepas. I have also found equally uncertain accounts of the alphabetical writing of the American aboriginal races, in a work of Pedro de Cieça de Leon,[[CS]] in Garcia,[[CT]] and in Columbus’s[[CU]] journal of his first voyage. M. de Verandrier maintained also that traces of the ploughshare were observed for days together in travelling over the grassy plains of Western Canada; a circumstance that other travellers, prior to him, likewise profess to have noticed. But the utter ignorance of the primitive nations of North America regarding this implement of agriculture, the want of beasts of draught, and the vast extent of surface over which these tracks extend through the prairie, tend rather to make me adopt the opinion that this singular appearance of furrows is owing to some movement of water over the earth’s surface.
[13]. p. 6—“It spreads like an arm of the sea.”
The great steppe, which extends from the mouth of the Orinoco to the snowy mountains of Merida, from east to west, deflects towards the south in the parallel of 8° north latitude, and occupies the whole space between the eastern declivity of the elevated mountains of New Granada and the Orinoco, which here flows in a northerly direction. That portion of the Llanos, which is watered by the Meta, Vichada, Zama, and Guaviare, connects as it were the valley of the Amazon with that of the Lower Orinoco. The word Paramo, which I have frequently employed in this work, signifies in the Spanish colonies all alpine regions which are situated from 11,000 to 14,000 feet above the level of the sea, and whose climate is rude, ungenial, and misty. In the higher Paramos hail and snow fall daily for many hours continuously, and yield a beneficial supply of humidity to the alpine plants, not from the absolute quantity of vapour in the higher strata of the air, but by the frequency of the aqueous deposits occasioned by the rapidly changing currents of air, and the variations of the electric tension. The trees found in these regions are low, and spread out in an umbrella-like form, have gnarled branches, which are constantly covered with fresh and evergreen foliage. They are mostly large-flowering laurel and myrtle-leaved alpine shrubs Escallonia tubar, Escallonia myrtilloides, Chuquiraga insignis, Araliæ, Weinmanniæ, Frezieræ, Gualtheriæ, and Andromeda reticulata, may be regarded as the representatives of the physiognomy of this vegetation.[[CV]] To the south of the town of Santa Fé de Bogota lies the celebrated Paramo de la Suma Paz, an isolated mountain group, in which, according to Indian legends, great treasures are concealed; and hence issues a small stream or brook, which pours its foaming waters through a remarkable natural bridge in the rocky ravine of Icononzo.
In my Latin treatise, De Distributione geographica Plantarum secundum cœli temperiem et altitudinem montium, 1817, p. 104, I have thus endeavoured to characterise these Alpine regions: “Altitudine 1700–1900 hexapod: asperriæ solitudines, quæ a colonis hispanis uno nomine Paramos appellantur, tempestatum vicissitudinibus mire obnoxiæ, ad quas solutæ et emollitæ defluunt nives; ventorum flatibus ac nimborum grandinisque jactu tumultuosa regio, quæ æque per diem et per noctes riget, solis nubila et tristi luce fere nunquam calefacta. Habitantur in hac ipsa altitudine sat magnæ civitates, ut Micuipampa Peruvianorum, ubi thermometrum centes. meridie inter 5° et 8°, noctu –0°.4 consistere vidi; Huancavelica, propter cinnabaris venas celebrata, ubi altitudine 1835 hexap. fere totum per annum temperies mensis Martii Parisiis.”
[14].