“It is a most striking fact that on one half of our planet there should be nations who are wholly unacquainted with the use of milk and of the meal yielded by narrow-eared grasses, (Hordeaceæ and Avenacecæ) whilst in the other hemisphere nations may be found in almost every region who cultivate cereals and rear milch cattle. The culture of different cereals is common to both hemispheres; but while in the New Continent we meet with only one species, maize, which is cultivated from 52° north to 46° south lat., we find that in the Old World the fruits of Ceres, (wheat, barley, spelt, and oats,) have been everywhere cultivated from the earliest ages recorded in history. The belief that wheat grew wild in the Leontine plains as well as in other parts of Sicily was common to several ancient nations, and is mentioned as early as Diodorus Siculus.”[[FZ]] Cereals were also found in the alpine meadow of Enna. Diodorus says expressly, “The inhabitants of the Atlantis were unacquainted with the fruits of Ceres, owing to their having separated from the rest of mankind before those fruits were made known to mortals.” Sprengel has collected several interesting facts from which he is led to conjecture that the greater number of our European cereals originally grew wild in Northern Persia and India. He supposes for instance that summer wheat was indigenous in the land of the Musicani, a province of Northern India;[[GA]] barley, antiquissimum frumentum, as Pliny terms it, and which was also the only cereal known to the Guansches of the Canaries, originated, according to Moses of Chorene,[[GB]] on the banks of the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Balascham, in Northern India;[[GC]] and Spelt originated in Hamadan.
My intelligent friend and teacher, Link, has however shown in a comprehensive and critical treatise,[[GD]] that these passages are open to much doubt. In a former essay of my own,[[GE]] I expressed doubts regarding the existence of wild cereals in Asia, and considered them to have become wild. Reinhold Forster, who before his voyage with Captain Cook made an expedition for purposes of natural history into the south of Russia by order of the Empress Catherine, reported that the two-lined summer barley (Hordeum distichon) grew wild near the confluence of the Samara and the Volga. At the end of September in the year 1829, Ehrenberg and myself also herborised on the Samara, during our journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the Caspian Sea. The quantity of wheat and rye plants growing wild on uncultivated ground in this district was certainly very remarkable; but the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary kinds. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a species of rye, Secale fragile, that had been gathered on the Kirghis Steppe, and which Marshal Bieberstein for some time conjectured to be the mother plant of our cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Michaux’s herbarium does not show (according to Achill Richard’s testimony), that Spelt (Triticum spelta) grows wild at Hamadan in Persia, as Olivier and Michaux have been supposed to maintain. More confidence is due to the recent accounts obtained through the unwearied zeal of the intelligent traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found a large quantity of rye (Secale cereale var. β, pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at heights of more than 5000 or 6000 feet above the level of the sea, on spots where this species of grain had not within the memory of the inhabitants been previously cultivated. “Its appearance here is the more important,” he remarks, “because with us this grain never propagates itself spontaneously.” Koch collected in the Schirwan part of the Caucasus a kind of grain which he calls Hordeum spontaneum, and regards as the originally wild Hordeum zeocriton. (Linn.)[[GF]]
A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in New Spain, from three seeds which he found amongst some rice brought from Spain for the use of the troops. In the Franciscan convent at Quito I saw, preserved as a relic, the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed in Quito by the Franciscan monk, Fray Jodoco Rixi de Gante, a native of Ghent in Flanders. The first crop was raised in front of the convent, on the “Plazuela de S. Francisco,” after the wood which then extended from the foot of the Volcano of Pichincha had been cleared. The monks, whom I frequently visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain the inscription on the cup, which according to their conjecture contained some hidden allusion to wheat. On examining the vessel, I read in old German the words “Let him who drinks from me, ne’er forget his God.” This old German drinking cup excited in me feelings of veneration! Would that everywhere in the New Continent the names of those were preserved who, instead of devastating the soil by bloody conquests, confided to it the first fruits of Ceres! There are “fewer examples of a general affinity of names in terms relating to the different species of corn and objects of agriculture than to the rearing of cattle. Herdsmen when they migrated to other regions had still much in common, while the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to invent special words. But the fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks seem to stand on the same footing with Germans and Slavonians, speaks in favour of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian java (frumentum hordeum), when compared with the Lithuanian jawai, and the Finnish jywa, affords a striking exception.”[[GG]]
[28]. p. 11.—“Preferring to keep within a cooler climate.”
Throughout the whole of Mexico and Peru we find the trace of human civilisation confined to the elevated table-lands. We saw the ruins of palaces and baths on the sides of the Andes, at an elevation of from 10,230 to 11,510 feet. None but northern tribes migrating from the north towards the equator could have remained from preference in such a climate.
[29]. p. 12.—“The history of the peopling of Japan.”
I believe I have succeeded in showing, in my work on the monuments of the American primitive races,[[GH]] by an examination of the Mexican and Thibetian-Japanese calendars, by a correct determination of the position of the Scansile Pyramids, and by the ancient myths which record four revolutions of the world and the dispersion of mankind after a great deluge, that the western nations of the New Continent maintained relations of intercourse with those of Eastern Asia, long before the arrival of the Spaniards. These observations have derived additional weight, since the appearance of my work, from the facts recently published in England, France, and the United States, regarding the remarkable pieces of sculpture carved in the Indian style, which have been discovered in the ruins of Guatimala and Yucatan.[[GI]] The ancient architectural remains found in the peninsula of Yucatan testify more than those of Palenque, to an astonishing degree of civilization. They are situated between Valladolid, Merida, and Campeche, chiefly in the western portion of the country. But the monuments on the island of Cozumel, (properly Cuzamil,) east of Yucatan, were the first which were seen by the Spaniards in the expedition of Juan de Grijalva in 1518, and in that of Cortes in 1519. Their discovery tended to diffuse throughout Europe an exalted idea of the advanced condition of ancient Mexican civilization. The most important ruins of the peninsula of Yucatan (unfortunately not yet thoroughly measured and drawn by architects) are those of the “Casa del Gobernador” of Uxmal, the Teocallis and vaulted constructions at Kabah, the ruins of Labnan with its domed pillars, those of Zayi which exhibit columns of an order of architecture nearly approaching the Doric, and those of Chiche with large ornamented pilasters. An old manuscript written in the Maya language by a Christian Indian, which is still in the hands of the “Gefe politico” of Peto, Don Juan Rio Perez, gives the different epochs (Katunes of 52 years) at which the Toltecs settled in different parts of the peninsula. Perez would infer from these data that the architectural remains of Chiche go back as far as the fourth century of our era, whilst those of Uxmal belong to the middle of the tenth century; but the accuracy of these historical deductions is open to great doubt.[[GJ]]
I regard the existence of a former intercourse between the people of Western America and these of Eastern Asia as more than probable, although it is impossible at the present time to say by what route and with which of the tribes of Asia this intercourse was established. A small number of individuals of the cultivated hierarchical castes may perhaps have sufficed to effect great changes in the social condition of Western America. The fabulous accounts formerly current regarding Chinese expeditions to the New Continent refer merely to expeditions to Fusang or Japan. It is, however, possible that Japanese and Sian-Pi may have been driven by storms from the Corea to the American coasts. We know as matters of history that Bonzes and other adventurers navigated the Eastern Chinese seas in search of a remedial agent capable of making man immortal. Thus under Tschin-chi-huang-ti three hundred young couples were dispatched to Japan in the year 209 before our era, who, instead of returning to China, settled on the Island of Nipon.[[GK]] May not accident have led to similar expeditions to the Fox Islands, to Alaschka, or New California? As the western coasts of the American continent incline from north-west to south-east, and the eastern coasts of Asia from north-east to south-west, the distance between the two continents in the milder zone, which is most conducive to mental development (45° lat.), would appear too considerable to admit of an accidental settlement having been made in this latitude. We must therefore assume that the first landing took place in the ungenial climate of 55° and 65°, and that cultivation, like the general advance of population in America, progressed by gradual stations from north to south.[[GL]] It was even believed in the beginning of the sixteenth century that the fragments of ships from Catayo, i.e. from Japan or China, had been found on the coasts of the Northern Dorado, called also Quivira and Cibora.[[GM]]
We know as yet too little of the languages of America entirely to renounce the hope that, amid their many varieties, some idiom may be discovered, that has been spoken with certain modifications in the interior of South America and Central Asia, or that might at least indicate an ancient affinity. Such a discovery would undoubtedly be one of the most brilliant to which the history of the human race can hope to attain! But analogies of language are only deserving of confidence where mere resemblances of sound in the roots are not alone the object of research, but attention is also directed to the organic structure, the grammatical forms, and those elements of language which manifest themselves as the product of the intellectual power of man.
[30]. p. 12—“Many other forms of animal life.”