Past Life in South America

Abstract

The minds of the British public, accustomed to review the complex phenomena of geology and palæontology in the Old, are apt to neglect the equally interesting evidences afforded to them of past life in the New World. American palæontology is distinguished not because the mighty hemisphere, now the seat of political convulsions, has not passed through analogous phases of life-stages to those presented by the elder continent, nor because the extinct fauna of America is less interesting than that of Europe, Asia, or Australia, nor that the most eminent men in both worlds have omitted to call attention to the stupendous monuments of bygone existence in the pampas of La Plata or on the shores of Patagonia, but because the public mind has not yet sufficiently realized the idea that during the period whilst Europe and Asia underwent the manifold and changing influences of geological time, like conditions were passed through in America.A tradition exists in the minds of all the earliest aboriginal nations of America, on the banks of the Missouri, at Manta, at Punta St. Elena in Ecuador, at Suacha in New Granada, at Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes, and at Tagua-tagua in the south of Chile, that a vast nation of colossal human beings existed before the present inhabitants. These giants, the credulous and imaginative mind of the native supposed, were destroyed by the deities, like the old race of Titans by the Olympian gods, or the Hrimthursar—the frost-giants of ice and snow—by the supporters of Odin and the Æsir in the Norse mythology.