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Since our voyage, M. Tschudi has come to the conclusion, by the comparison of old and modern maps, that the coast both north and south of Lima has certainly subsided. On the island of San Lorenzo, there are very satisfactory proofs of elevation within the recent period; this of course is not opposed to the belief, of a small sinking of the ground having subsequently taken place.
Tschudi met it mountaineering on the Andes at an enormous altitude, and, true to its lawless nature, it confronted me in Patagonia, where the books say no marsupial dwells. In every way it is adapted to an arboreal life, yet it is everywhere found on the level country, far removed from the conditions which one would imagine to be necessary to its existence.
The letters of the period express unbounded confidence in the nascent play. It was to be a 'powerful thing which should shake the theaters of Germany', and a 'genuine folk-play for the entire public'. Honest Tschudi continued to be the great source, but other writers were read and excerpted.
Yet it is certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell's contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the Waldstätte, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever.
It was the same case in the scene of his former labors. The inhabitants of Glarus, to whom he had gone, towards the close of December, in order to resign his post, which he had retained till this time, respected him so highly, that, on the strength of his recommendation, they passed themselves over to the care of Valentine Tschudi. At Einsiedeln, Geroldseck acted in the same way.
The bricklayer will throw down his trowel for a minute, the carpenter leave his bench, the corn grinder her milling stone, and the porter his load, to keep time to the inspiriting sound." Dr. Tschudi, in his fascinating work on Peru, describes two of the musical instruments used by the Indians, and their emotional function.
One is the Pututo, "a large conch on which they perform mournful music, as the accompaniment of their funeral dances." The other is called Jaina, and is a rude kind of clarionet made from a reed. "Its tone," says Tschudi, "is indescribable in its melancholy, and it produces an extraordinary impression on the natives.
The fact is well known to every field-naturalist, and with reference to England several examples may be found in Charles Dixon's Among the Birds in Northern Shires. S.W. Baker, Wild Beasts, etc., vol. i. p. 316. Tschudi, Thierleben der Alpenwelt, p. 404. Houzeau's Etudes, ii. 463.
From the manner in which the fringes of gravel are prolonged in unbroken slopes up the valleys of the Cordillera, I infer that most of the greater dislocations took place during the earlier parts of the great elevation in mass: I have, however, elsewhere given a case, and M. de Tschudi has given another, of a ridge thrown up in Peru across the bed of a river, and consequently after the final elevation of the country above the level of the sea.
Johannes von Müller, in the endeavor to remain faithful in his portraiture to the times he describes, has given a stiff, formal, pedantic aspect to his history. We much prefer the narratives we find in old Tschudi; all is more naïve and natural than when appearing in the garb of a fictitious and affected archaism.
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