The Lama, the Paco or Alpaca, and the Guanaco, are three originally distinct species of animals. (Tschudi, S. 228 and 237.) The Guanaco (Huanacu in the Quichua language) is the largest of the three; and the Alpaca, measured from the ground to the crown of the head, the smallest. The lama is next to the guanaco in stature. Herds of lamas, when they are as numerous as I have seen them in the high plateau between Quito and Riobamba, are a great ornament to the landscape. The Moromoro of Chili appears to be a mere variety of the lama. Vicuñas, Guanacoes, and Alpacas, still live wild at elevations of from 13000 to 16000 feet above the level of the sea. The two latter species are sometimes met with tamed, but the guanaco only rarely. The alpaca does not bear the warmer climate of the lower elevations so well as the lama. Since the introduction of the more useful horses, mules, and asses, (the latter acquire great spirit and beauty within the tropics), the custom of rearing and using the lama and the alpaca as beasts of burden, in the mountains and among the mines, has much decreased. But the wool, of such different qualities in respect to fineness, is still an important article in the industry of the inhabitants of the mountains. In Chili the wild and the tamed guanaco are distinguished by separate names; the wild being called Luan, and the tame Chilihueque. The wide dissemination of the wild guanaco, from the Peruvian Cordilleras to Tierra del Fuego, sometimes in herds of 500, has been favoured by the circumstance that these animals can swim with great ease from island to island, so that the Patagonian fiords offer no obstacle to their wanderings. (See the pleasing descriptions by Darwin in his Journal, 1845, p. 66.)
South of the Gila River, which, together with the Rio Colorado, enters the Californian Gulf or Mar de Cortes, stand, in the solitude of the Steppe, the enigmatical ruins of the Aztec Palace, called by the Spaniards las Casas grandes. When the Aztecs, about the year 1160, came from the unknown land of Aztlan to Anahuac, they settled themselves for a time on the banks of the Gila. The Franciscan monks, Garces and Font, are the latest travellers who have visited the Casas grandes, and they did so in 1773. They stated the ruins to extend over above a square German mile (16 English square miles). The whole plain is strewed with fragments of painted pottery. The principal palace, (if a house built of unburnt clay can be so designated), is 447 English feet long and 277 English feet broad. (See a rare work printed in Mexico, and entitled Cronica seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro por Fr. Juan Domingo Arricivita).
The Tayé of California, as drawn by Father Venegas, appears to differ little from the Ovis musimon of the Old Continent. The same animal is also seen on the “Stony Mountains,” near the sources of the Peace River. Very different from it, on the other hand, is the small white and black spotted goat-like creature which feeds near the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. The synonymy of Antilope furcifer, A. tememazama of Smith, and Ovis montana, is still very undetermined.
[27] p. 14.—“The cultivation of farinaceous grasses.”
The original habitat of the farinaceous grasses is wrapped in the same obscurity as that of the domestic animals which have accompanied man since his earliest migrations. The German word for corn, “Getraide,” has been ingeniously derived by Jacob Grimm from the old German gitragidi, getregede. “It is as it were the tame fruit (fruges, frumentum), which has come into the hands of man; as we speak of tame animals in opposition to wild ones.” (Jacob Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, 1848, Th. i. S. 62.) It is certainly a very striking phenomenon, to find on one side of our planet nations to whom flour or meal from small-eared grasses (Hordeaceæ and Avenaceæ), and the use of milk, were completely unknown, while the nations of almost all parts of the other hemisphere cultivate the Cerealia, and rear milk-yielding animals. The cultivation of different kinds of grasses may be said to afford a characteristic distinction between the two parts of the world. In the New Continent, from 52° north to 46° south latitude, we see only one species cultivated, viz. maize. In the Old Continent, on the other hand, we find every where, from the earliest times of history, the fruits of Ceres, wheat, barley, spelt or red wheat, and oats. That wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields, as well as in several other places in Sicily, was a belief entertained by ancient nations, and is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus. (Lib. v. p. 199 and 232, Wessel.) Ceres was found in the alpine meadow of Enna; and Diodorus fables that “the inhabitants of the Atlantis were unacquainted with the fruits of Ceres, because they had separated from the rest of mankind before those fruits had been shewn to mortals.” Sprengel has collected several interesting passages which lead him to think it probable that the greater part of our European kinds of grain were originally wild in the northern parts of Persia and India, namely, summer wheat in the country of the Musicanes, a province in Northern India (Strabo, xv. 1017); barley (“antiquissimum frumentum,” as Pliny calls it, and which is also the only cereal with which the Guanches of the Canaries were acquainted), according to Moses of Chorene (Geogr, Armen. ed. Whiston, 1736, p. 360), on the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Balascham in Northern India (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10); and spelt or red wheat, near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been shewn by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an instructive critical memoir (Abhandl. de Berl. Akad. 1816, S. 123), still leave much uncertainty. I also early regarded the existence of originally wild kinds of grain in Asia as extremely doubtful, and viewed such as might have been seen there as having become wild. (Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes, 1805, p. 28.) Reinhold Forster, who before his voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of the Empress Catherine an expedition into Southern Russia for purposes of natural history, reported that the two-stalked summer barley (Hordeum distichon), grew wild near the junction of the Samara and the Volga. At the end of the month of September, 1829, Ehrenberg and myself, on our journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the Caspian, also herborised on the banks of the Samara. We were, indeed, struck with the quantity of wheat and rye plants growing in what might be called a wild state in the uncultivated ground, but the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary cultivated ones. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a kind of rye, Secale fragile, gathered on the Kirgis Steppe, and which Marschall von Bieberstein regarded for a time as the original or mother plant of our cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Although Olivier and Michaux speak of spelt (Triticum spelta) as growing wild at Hamadan in Persia, Achill Richard does not consider that Michaux’s herbarium bears out this statement. Greater confidence is due to the most recent accounts obtained by the unwearied zeal of a highly-informed traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found much rye (Secale cereale, var. β pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at elevations of upwards of five or six thousand feet, in places where within the memory of the inhabitants no grain of the kind had ever been cultivated. Koch remarks, that the circumstance is “the more important because with us this grain never propagates itself spontaneously.” In the Schirwan parts of the Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of barley which he calls “Hordeum spontaneum,” and considers to be the originally wild “Hordeum zeocriton” of Linnæus. (Carl Koch Beiträge zur Flora des Orients, Heft i. S. 139 and 142.)
A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in New Spain. He had found three grains of it amongst the rice which had been brought from Spain for provision for the army. In the Franciscan convent at Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed there by the Franciscan monk Fray Jodoco Rixi, a native of Ghent in Flanders. The first sowing had been made in front of the convent, on what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cutting down the forest which then extended from the foot of the volcano of Pichincha to the spot in question. The monks, who I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them the inscription on the earthen vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the old German dialect, and was—“Whoso drinks from me let him not forget his God.” I too felt with the monks that this old German drinking vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been preserved every where in the New Continent the names, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who first intrusted to it these its fruits so early associated with the civilisation of mankind in the Old Continent! In respect generally to the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affinities of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that “such indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care of cattle: herdsmen when dispersed had still much in common, whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new words. But the fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear nearly on a par with the Germans and Slavonians, argues in favour of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian “java” (Frumentum hordeum), compared with the Lithuanian “jawai,” and the Finnish “jywa,” offers a singular exception.” (Jac. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, Th. i. S. 69.)
[28] p. 14.—“Keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions.”
Throughout Mexico and Peru the traces of a great degree of civilisation are confined to the elevated plateaux. We have seen on the Andes the ruins of palaces and baths at heights between 1600 and 1800 toises (10230 and 11510 English feet). It can only have been men of a northern race, who, migrating from the north towards the south, could find delight in such a climate.
[29] p. 15.—“The history of the peopling of Japan.”
The probability of the western nations of the New Continent having had communication with the east of Asia long before the arrival of the Spaniards, was I think shewn by me in a work on the monuments of the native inhabitants of America (Vues des Cordillères et Monumens des peuples indigenes de l’Amérique). I inferred this probability from a comparison of the Mexican and Thibeto-Japanese calendars,—from the correct orientation of the steps of the pyramidal elevations towards the different quarters of the heavens,—and from the ancient myths and traditions of the four ages or four epochs of destruction of the world, and the dispersion of mankind after a great flood of waters. The accounts published since my work, in England, France, and the United States, describing the wonderful bas reliefs, almost in the Indian style, in the ruins of Guatimala and Yucatan, have given to these analogies a still higher value. (Compare Antonio del Rio, Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City discovered near Palenque, 1822, translated from the original manuscript report by Cabrera (del Rio’s exploration took place in 1787), p. 9, tab. 12–14; with Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843, vol. i. pp. 391 and 429–434; vol. ii. pp. 21, 54, 56, 317, 323; with the magnificent volume of Catherwood, “Views of ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan,” 1844; and lastly, with Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico,” vol. iii. App. p. 360.)