The Glasgow Chronicle. — 1850-04-10 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

DIVERSITIES OF SAVAGE RACES.  The northern desert of Africa divides two races of men who belong originally to the same part of the globe, and whose unreconciled discord appears as ancient as the mythus of Osiris and Typhon. North of the Atlas there dwell nations with long and strait hair, of sallow complexion and Caucasian features. On the south of the Senegal, to. wards Soudan, live hordes of negroes in many different stages of civilisation. In Central Asia, the Mongolian steppe divides Siberian barbarism from the ancient civilization of the peninsula of India. The South American steppes form the boundary of a partial European cultivation. To the north, between the mountains of Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, we find commercial cities, neat villages, and carefully cultivated fields. Even the love of art and scientific culture, together with the noble desire of civil freedom, hay, long been awakened there. Towards the south, the steppe termi Inas in a savage wilderness. Forests, the growth of thousands ollyears,fill,with their impenetrable fastnesses, the humid regions between the Orinoco and the Amazons. Massive leaden.coloured granite rocks narrow the bed of the foaming rivers. Mountains and forests resound with the thunder of the falling waters, with the roar of the tiger-like jaguar, and with the melancholy rain, announcing howlings of the bearded apes. Where a sandbank is left dry by the shallow current, the unwieldy crocodiles lie with open jaws, as motionless as pieces of rock, and often covered with birds. The boa •-erpent, his body marked like a chess-board, coiled up, his tail wound round the branch of a tree, lies lurking on the bank, secure of his prey; he marks the young bull, or some feebler inhabitant of the forest, as it fords the stream, and swiftly uncoiling seizes the victim, and covering it with mucus, forces it laboriously down his swelling throat. In the midst of this grand and savage nature, live many tribes of men, isolated from each other by the extraordinrry diversity of their languages; some are nomadic, wholly unacquainted.with agriculture, and using ants, gums, and earth as food; 'these, as the Otomacs and Tarures, seem a kind of outcasts from humanity; others, like the Maquiritares and Macos, are settled, more intelligent and of milder manners, and live on fruits which they have themselves reared. Large spaces between the Cassiquire and the Atabapo are only inhabited by the tapir and the social apes, and are wholly destitute of human beings. Figures, graven on the rocks show that even these deserts were once the seat of some degree of intellectual cultivation. They bear witness to the changeful destinies of man, as do the unequally developed flexible languages ; which latter belong to the oldest and most imperishable class of historic memorials. But as in the steppe tigers and crocodiles fight with horses and cattle, so in the forests on its borders, in the wilderness of Guiana, man is ever armed against man. Some tribes drink with unnatural thirst the blood of their enemies; others, apparently weaponless, and prepared for murder, kill with a poisoned thum-nail. The weaker hordes when they have to pass along the sandy margin of the rivers, theyfully efface with their hands the traces of their timid footsteps. Thus man in the lowest state of almost animal rudeness, as well as amid the apparent brilliancy of our higher cultivation, prepares for himself and his fellow-men increased toil and danger. The traveller wandering over the wide globe by sea and land, as well as the historic inquirer searching the records of past ages, finds everywhere the uniform and saddening spectacle of man at variance with man. He, therefore, who, amidst the unreconciled discord of nations, seeks for intellectual calm, gladly turns to contemplate the silent life of vegetation, and the hidden • activities of force and power operating in the sanctuaries 6 of nature; or, obedient to the inborn impulse which for • thousands of years has glowed in the human breast, gazes upwards in meditative contemplation on those celestial orbs, which are ever pursuing in undisturbed harmony their ancient and anchanging course.—Humbolt's Aspects of Nature.