But this very question of language has enabled D. G. Brinton to track the Mayans to their stock. By a careful comparison of one hundred Natchez (an Apalachian tribe) words with their equivalents in the Mayan dialects, he has proved a very remarkable affinity between the two languages. "Of these hundred," he writes, "five have affinities, more or less marked, to words peculiar to the Huastecas of the River Panuco; thirteen to words common to Huastecas and Mayan; and thirty-nine to words of similar meaning in the latter language." This linguistic similarity would be remarkable by itself. But when you find that physically such Apalachian tribes as the Seminoles and Creeks are strikingly like the Mayan type, and when you realise that this Apalachian stock was all round the land of the Mayans, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Mayans must be ultimately referred to this stock. The Apalachians joined Mexico on the north-east; they stretched down the peninsula of Florida, and probably originally inhabited Cuba and some of the West Indian islands, before the arrival there of the powerful Arawak people, who were found in the islands by the Spanish.
Being thus all round Mexico and Yucatan, it would be curious if some of the Apalachians were not found in those countries. Ethnological data are woefully lacking in all questions affecting the vast congeries of peoples which go to form the aborigines of the two Americas. But it would certainly seem that philologically, physically, and geographically we here have such evidence as points very clearly to the Mayans being a remote offshoot of the Apalachian stock.
But if they are Apalachians, they certainly did not derive their building skill from their ancestors. Florida and the Eastern States are devoid of all ancient buildings. The much discussed mounds of the Mississippi district have not the remotest relationship with the temples and palaces of Yucatan; but are probably totemic symbols, nothing more or less.
On this subject Professor Cyrus Thomas, in Problems of the Ohio Mounds (Washington, 1889), writes: "Mexico, Central America and Peru are dotted with the ruins of stone edifices, but in all the mound-building area of the United States not the slightest vestige of one attributable to the people who erected the eastern structures is to be found.... Though hundreds of groups of mounds marking the sites of ancient villages are to be seen scattered over the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf States, yet nowhere can there be found an ancient house."
It is true that the island of Cuba has never been really thoroughly explored; but enough has been done to show that there are no building "finds" likely there. Señor Andres Poey in a paper on "Cuban Antiquities," read before the American Ethnological Society in 1855, speaks of the great scarcity in the island of relics of stone. Only four statues, very rude representations of anthropoid ape-like animals, had been found. As monkeys were not known to have ever existed in Cuba, it would certainly seem as if these carvings had been brought over from Yucatan, with the Mayan inhabitants of which country it is certain that the Cuban Arawaks traded. The stone implements and earthenware vases found have also, for the most part, been attributed to the same source. Of stone buildings the Arawaks had none. "The villages consisted," says D. G. Brinton, writing in The American Archæologist of October, 1898, "of ten to twelve communal houses, always perishable; none having been heard of as stone."
If then the Mayans are akin to the Apalachians, there is no trace among their kindred of such elementary forms of building as would have certainly been found if the architecture which has made them so famous had been naturally developed. Thus we are bound to conclude that it was exotic; that they learnt it from some foreign visitors to their territory long after they had split off and migrated thither from the Apalachian centre.
Who those foreign visitors were we will try to prove in the succeeding chapter. Here let us summarise the foregoing pages as follows:—
1. The Toltec theory is myth, not history.
2. The Toltecs were never an historical nationality.