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around it, and for many miles barren, would not have been able to support the population of a large city. Today it produces merely a few _ocas_ (a kind of small potato that is preserved frozen), and yields scanty crops of maize and beans. Tiahuanaco _may_, at some distant period, have enjoyed the privilege of being a seaport. Nothing opposes this supposition. On one hand, it is a well-known fact that, owing to the conical motion of the earth, the waters retreat continually from the western coasts of America, which rise at a certain known ratio every century. On the other hand, the bank of oysters and other marine shells and debris, found on the slopes of the Andes to near their summits, obviously indicate that at some time or other the sea has covered them. When was that? I will leave to sectarians to compute, lest the reckoning should carry us back to that time when the space between Tiahuanaco and Easter Island was dry land, and the valleys and plains now lying under the waters of the Pacific swarmed with industrious, intelligent human beings, were strewn with cities and villas, yielded luxuriant crops to the inhabitants, and the figure should show that people lived there before the creation of the world. I recoil with horror at the mere idea of being even suspected of insinuating such an heretical doctrine. But if the builders of the strange structures on Easter Island have had, then, communications with the rearers of Tiahuanaco by _land_, then we may easily account for the many coincidences which exist between the laws, religious rites, sciences,--astronomical and others,--customs, monuments, languages, and even dresses, of the inhabitants of this Western continent, and those of Asia and Africa. Hence the similarity of many Asiatic and American notions. Hence, also, the generalized idea of a deluge among men, whose traditions remount to the time when the waters that covered the plains of America, Europe, Africa and Asia left their beds, invaded the portions of the globe they now occupy, and destroyed their inhabitants. Since that time, when, of course, all communications were cut between the few individuals that escaped the cataclysm by taking refuge on the highlands, their intercourse has been renewed at different and very re
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