Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting some supernatural creature of unknown powers.
But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.
Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of America from passing into the pastoral stage.
And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, the Indians had cultivated plants—notably that maize, sometimes called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been imported into North America from the south.
MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.
Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority of the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth deity to grant them good harvests.
Egypt and Mexico