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