animals and enable them to grow and multiply, requires all the heat which the sun can communicate to a fertile soil; and for a reason directly opposite it is, that insects, reptiles, and all the little animals which wallow in the mud, whose blood is watery, and whose increase depends on putrefaction, are more numerous and large in the low, humid, and marshy lands of the new continent. When we reflect on these very striking differences between the old and new continents, we can hardly help supposing that the latter is, in fact, more recent, and has remained buried under the ocean longer than the rest of the globe; for, the enormous western mountains excepted, which seem to be monuments of the most remote antiquity, it has all the appearance of being a land newly sprung up. We find sea-shells in many places under the very first stratum of the vegetable earth, formed into masses of lime-stone, though usually less hard and compact than our free-stone. If this continent is in reality as ancient as the other, why did so few men exist on it? why were the most of that few wandering savages? why did the Mexicans and Peruvians, who alone had entered into society, reckon only 200 or 300 years from the first man who taught them to assemble? why had they not reduced the lama, pacos, and other animals, by which they were surrounded, into a domestic state? As their society was in its infancy, so were their arts; their talents were imperfect, their ideas unexpanded, their organs rude, and their language barbarous. The names of their animals[C], of which we have subjoined a few as a specimen, were so difficult to pronounce, that our only astonishment is, how the Europeans should have taken the trouble to write them. [Footnote C: _Pelon ichiati oquitli_--the lama. _Tapiierete_, in Brasil; _maniporous_, in Guinea--the tapir. _Macatlchichiltic temamacama_--the antelope of New Spain. _Quauhtla coymatl_--the Mexican hog. _Tlacoozclotl_--the mountain cat. _Tlaclaughqui ocelotl_, in Mexico--the jaguar. _Hoitzlaquatzin_--the porcupine of New Spain. _Xoloitzchuintli_--the Mexican wolf.]