ing to the Delawares and other expatriated tribes on the banks of the Cauadian rivers, and on the prairies of Kansas. So likewise with the primitive arts of pottery and glass-making, spinning and weaving, each of which is still extensively practised by the Pimas and other tribes. Even to the present day, according to the report of the latest traveller amongst them, the Navajos, Zunis, and the Jemez manufacture woollen and cotton tissues which are highly prized by their white neighbors. There is no authenticated instance, we believe, of any Indian tribe or family having lapsed into "a state of nature." All have been more or less contaminated-and some, like the powerful and highly civilized Natchez, hopelessly ruined and degraded -by contact with the Parthis mendaciores infesting their country; but none, as yet, have sunk into absolute barbarism. Numbers excepted, they are now in many respects what they were in the sixteenth century. The conquest of the New World by the Spaniards, and its gradual occupation by successive races of white men, have checked the development, but not destroyed the primitive institutions of the Indians. For aught, indeed, that can be urged to the contrary, they have been stationary for a much longer period; and having been excluded from intercourse with the outer world, have become at length, what we find them, a fossilized people, like that of China.

That the tribes of New Mexico inherited a civilization, more or less perfect, from extinct races which occupied that country before them, is an indisputable fact. No barbarous nation or nations could have executed the structural monuments that have been partially described, or have fabricated the multifarious works of art that are daily brought to light. Both the one and the other establish the early existence of a settled, industrious, and, to some extent, cultivated people. Whence, then, did the people derive their practical knowledge of the useful arts, and all the concomitants of ancient civilized life? Or, were these things really, as not a few imagine, of cis-Atlantic origin? That inquiry depends upon another and much more pertinent one-namely, were the primitive occupants of the northern con

tinent of America immigrants or autochthones? Ethnographers, naturalists, archæologists have attempted in vain to solve these problems; scarcely two of them are of the same opinion. As yet, no satisfactory hypothesis has been framed for general acceptance. Scandinavia, Gaul, Mauritania, Carthage, Egypt, Palestine, Hindustan, China, Mongolia, Siberia, and even Wales and Ireland, are supposed by some to have furnished their respective quotas toward the peopling of the New World; whilst others, including the late Dr. Morton, of New York, have maintained that the ancient population was a distinct type of humanity, indigenous to the soil. That celebrated craniologist, indeed, went far ahead of his contemporaries, and divided the aboriginal American races into two families-the Toltecan natives and the barbarous tribes— which differed, he contended, as essentially in their physical as in their moral characteristics. But since the publication of his well-known "Crania Americana," several important ethnological discoveries have been made elsewhere on the continent, in the south more especially, which completely sweep away his favorite, or rather sole, criterion of intellectual capacity-the development of the facial angle. The traditions of the Indians are much too vague and conflicting to resolve a doubt, much less to establish a theory, in the matter of their ancestry. True, some of themas, for example, the Algonquins, the Athapascans, the Ioways, and the Pimas, all widely separated from each otheruniformly point to the rising sun as the direction whence their forefathers came; but this motion may only indicate that they migrated from the eastern extremity of the continent, and not from the eastern hemisphere. In some instances, it undoubtedly means no more than that they are the boasted prosperity or the adopted children of a divine personage, who is supposed to have emanated from the great luminary. The Quichés alone have preserved anything like a definite account of their origin; and what makes this fact the more remarkable is, that they have been established in Central America from immemorial time. According to their earliest traditions their progenitors travelled from the east,

making a perilous journey through icefields and in protracted darkness; from which circumstance it has been inferred by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, and others, that they must necessarily have passed into the American continent either by some Arctic route, or by the Aleutian Isles in the depth of winter. To ourselves this tradition appears more curious than important. Visitors' tales of frost-bound seas and of days without a sunrise would naturally make a very deep impression upon the minds of a people confined within the tropics; who, in the course of time, would not unlikely associate such extraordinary phenomena with the personal history of their remote ancestors, and thus cast a thicker veil of mystery over it or add a fresh marvel to it. Of the innumerable tribes or families of Indians still in existence, not one has any conception, much less any traditional knowledge, of a single country in the Old World. The geographical notions of the most intelligent amongst them are bounded by their own horizon. So far as is now known, the ancient Mexicans were the solitary exceptions to this rule. That they crossed over from Asia by the Aleutian Isles, about the eleventh century of our era, is a fact established as well by the declaration of the last of their Incas to his Spanish conquerors, as by a curious geographical chart of their migration preserved by Boturini.* "Dim as these traditions are (observes Mr. Schoolcraft), they shed some light on the thick historical darkness which shrouds the period. They point decidedly to a foreign, to an oriental if not Shemitic, origin. Such an origin had been inferred from the first. At whatever point the investigation has been made, the eastern hemisphere has been found to contain the physical and mental prototypes of the race. Language, mythology, religious dogmas, the very style of architecture, and their calendar, as far as it is developed, point to that fruitful and central source of human dispersion and nationality."+

Whilst allowing there has been, for ages, a continuous emigration from the east of Asia-a fact, indeed, which is

Mr. Fergusson holds that the Toltecs represent the Esquimaux, and that the Aztecs were Red Indians; but we cannot discover any ground

for this theory.

p. 26.

Indian Tribes of the United States, vol. i.,

abundantly evidenced, as well by the physical characteristics of the Indian tribes occupying the mighty deserts in the north and north-west as by their manners, customs, and traditions, which so closely resemble those of the Mongols on the neighboring continent-it is, we think, equally demonstrable that other colonists, more civilized than wandering hordes of Tartars, found their way thither directly across the Pacific. In possession of the magnet, the most ancient of the eastern nations boldly navigated the wide ocean in vessels of great burden; whilst as yet the nations in the west were timidly following the sinuosities of their coasts in shallow canoes or on ruder rafts. Some of the natives of India, like the "godlike" Phæacians whom Homer extols, were enterprising merchants and hardy mariners from the remotest antiquity. And so, no doubt, were the maritime populations of the Eastern Archipelago. If the oldest Japanese maps are to be depended on, their voyages formerly extended to Java, and on the north to Behring's Straits and to the coast of America, which they called Foosang-a name by which it was also known to the Chinese long prior to the Christian era.

The oldest traditions of the Peruvians, the Brazilians, and the Araucanians (the aborigines of Valdivia), refer to the arrival in their countries respectively of illustrious strangers who came from afar, across the ocean. Only on the supposition that more frequent intercourse, by water, was maintained between the several nations of antiquity than is usually conceded by modern ethnographers and others, is it possible to account for the intermixture of races and the similarity of customs and institutions observable in different quarters of the globe. For example, families that physically approximate in type to the Redskins of North America have been discovered on the eastern coast of Africa, on the Island of Madagascar, on the South Australian continent, as well as scattered throughout Polynesia. And so, too, a very close conformity existed between the religious creeds and practices of the Etrurians and the Aztecas. In Italy and America human sacrifices were customary at the graves of illustrious chieftains. In the former country they were superseded by

rifices and expiatory self-punishments. Notwithstanding what has oftentimes been urged to the contrary, this congruity of religious ideas and practices in both hemispheres is of so decisive a character as to demonstrate a single primitive source. "We cannot," remarks Sir William Jones, "justly conclude by arguments preceding the proof of facts, that one idolatrous people must have borrowed their deities, rítes, and tenets from another, since gods of all shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, without fancy or prejudice to color them and improve their likeness, we can scarcely help believing that some connection has in immemorial time subsisted between the several nations which have adopted them." (Works, vol. i. p. 229.) There are now no means of determining at what particular epoch in the world's history the worship of the Lingham in India, of Peor-Apis in Egypt, of the Phallus in Greece, or Priapus in Rome, originated. But, according to the received chronology of the Bible, the worship of Baal-Peor prevailed among the Moabites 1450 B.C. (Numb. xxv. 3) or long before it was received into Europe. From the remains which are still in existence, it may have passed into America at a time coeval with its introduction into Egypt. And this fact brings us to a still higher point in the primitive history of the continent.

Pyramidal piles of earth and stone are the peculiar marks by which we may discover the sites of the earliest settlements of mankind. The idea of such piles first appeared in the valley of the Euphrates, and culminated in the valley of the Nile. Whatever their forms, or wherever situated, in Asia or in Africa, one condition is common to them all intended primarily for astronomical observatories, the sides of each accurately correspond with the cardinal points. This is also the case with the pyramids of America. In determining the epoch of the aboriginal migration to that continent, this remarkable coextension or analogy again carries us back to that NEW SERIES-VOL. VI., No. 4.

period when mankind, after being dissipated in the plains of Shinar, had reëstablished themselves in the different quarters of the globe. We have already referred to the magnificent pyramidal structures of Mexico; which, excepting the shrines, were undoubtedly the work of the Toltecans, if not of an earlier people; but be that as it may, there are pyramidal ruins in Yucatan and Central America of a much more ancient date than any to be found elsewhere in the New World-so ancient, indeed, as to compare with similar monuments in Egypt, which are generally ascribed to the Memphite period. If, as we believe, the New World borrowed its designs for such structures, the aborigines must have travelled to the valley of the Nile for that purpose, rather than brought them from the shores of the Euxine and Caspian Seas-a circumstance which, we may remark by the way, shows them to have been not only a less cultivated but a later settled nation than the Egyptians. Their conventional ideas of pictography and sculpture point to the same origin. According to Sir Gardner Wilkinson, no signs of progress from infancy to the more advanced stages of art are perceptible on the earliest monuments of Egypt: it was in after-times the Egyptian sculptors bound themselves. so rigidly to conventional forms in the human figure. And so in America, the most ancient remains exhibit similar characteristics. The same unalterable forms satisfied the devotion or the taste of successive generations; and consequently no improvement was made upon them. In the types of primitive art, the New World merely reflected the light of the Old. Hence, there was no warmth or creative power in it. Generation after generation servilely copied each other, but with gradually diminishing skill, or in almost the exact ratio of the distance which separated them from Central America and Yucatan, the earliest seats of civilization on the continent. That Africa, not the East, was the original source of their inspirationperhaps about the age of the fourth Egyptian dynasty may be inferred, partly from the peculiar situations, internal economy, and identical embellishment of the structures in question, and partly from the most primitive mode of

26

sepulture observable in the immediate vicinity of them. The pile is invariably erected, for the purpose of sacred ablu tions, in close proximity to water; either on the bank of a stream, or on the shore of a lake, or, in the absence of these, an artificial pond of proportionate dimensions has been excavated at its base; central apartments, for the preservation of the sacred elements, reached by descending galleries at a particular angle of declination, are found in all of them, as well as a secret communication with the river, lake, or pond, usually by means of a subterranean passage: and lastly, the neighboring valley or plain, as the case may be, is filled with innumerable catacombs, in many localities hewed out of the solid rock. The great pyramid on the plateau of Caernavaca, and known as Xochicalco, "the house of flowers," is reported to be scarcely distinguishable from the ordinary type of those in Lower Egypt. Its position and configuration show it to be one of the group of adjacent hills. It is truncated and divided into four terraces.

"The intermediate slopes (says Mr. Norman) are covered with platforms, bastions, pyramidal and rectangular elevations and stages, one above another, all faced with large porphyry stones admirably cut, but joined together without cement; the perpendicular height is estimated to be from 300 to 380 feet. The construction of the stories is irregularly like the Egyptian style of architecture; the lower parts inclining inward at an angle of 15° for a short distance, and then being surmounted with perpendicular courses projecting over the inferior portion. Upon the stories of this pyramid are many figures sculptured in relief, some representing hieroglyphic signs, and others human figures seated cross-legged in Asiatic manner, and crocodiles spouting water."

Want of space precludes our pursuing these architectural analogies any farther; suffice it to say, therefore, that the distinction between the earlier and later pyramidal temples of the New World is quite as remarkable as that between the ancient Egyptian structure and those erected by the Greek colonists under the Ptolemies. No doubt, very many of the earliest piles have been modified in subsequent ages, to suit the particular necessities or tastes of the people; yet, in every such instance, the archaic type has been but slightly de

parted from, whilst the primitive example in the decorations without, always emblematical of the worship conducted within, has been scrupulously followed to the last. This is very apparent in the magnificent ruins of Yucatan; where, according to the unanimous reports of Mr. Stephens and later travellers in that wonderful country, the serpent entwined about the stem of the lotus is frequently repeated on the friezes of the temples; and at Palenqué, also, "a rectangular square is surrounded by cloisters... and lighted by windows bearing the exact form of the Egyptian face."

It is proverbial among Transatlantic travellers, that he who has seen one tribe has seen all; so closely do individuals of every family resemble each other, notwithstanding their immense geographical dissemination, and those differences of climate which embrace the extremes of heat and cold. And after devoting a lifetime to the investigation of their linguistic affinities, the late venerable Albert Gallatin arrived at the same conclusion. "However differing in is an evident similarity in the structure their vocabularies," he remarks, "there of all the American languages." From whatever land the aboriginal population of North America proceeded-from Eastern Siberia, by the passage of Behring's Straits, or by the Aleutian Islands; or, which we conceive to be much more probable, from the Bactrian heights or Hindustan, by the Indian and Pacific Oceans,-the influence of their genius, mythology, and civilization has not wholly declined to this day. Hence many have likewise been led to believe in the unity of the American races. Without impeaching the justice of this opinion, so far as it affects the existing tribes of native Red Indians, we cannot but think that the aboriginal occupants of the soil disappeared long before the advent of the Spaniards. So far as is now known, the highest civilized races, at the era of the conquest, were restricted to the territory falling within the 10th and 25th degrees of North latitude, and to that smaller region which is watered by the Rio Colorado

* Vide Mr. J S. Phillips's Essay on the Physical Type of the American Indians, Schoolerafi, vol. ii., p. 316.

Trans. Amer. Ethnol. Soc., vol. ii., p. 367.