Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

The Ottomaka.—These are the dirt-eaters. They fill their stomach with an unctuous clay, found in their country; and that, whether food of a better sort be abundant or deficient.

There is plenty of difference here; still where there is difference in some points there is so often agreement in others that no very decided difficulties are currently recognized as lying against the doctrine of the South Americans being specifically connected. When such occur, they are generally inferences from either the superior civilization of the ancient Peruvians or from the peculiarity of their skulls. The latter has been considered. The former seems to be nothing different in kind from that of several other American families—the Muysca of New Grenada, the Mexican, and the Maya further northwards. But this may prove too much; since it may merely be a reason for isolating the Mexicans, &c. Be it so. The question can stand over for the present.

Something has now been seen of two classes of phænomena which will appear and re-appear in the sequel—viz. the great difference in the physical conditions of such areas as the Fuegian, the Pampa, the Peruvian, and the Warows, and the contrast between the geographical extension of such vast groups as the Guarani, and small families like the Wapisiana, the Yurakares, and more than twenty others.

There is a great gap between South and Central America: nor is it safe to say that the line of the Andes (or the Isthmus of Darien) gives the only line of migration. The islands that connect Florida and the Caraccas must be remembered also.

The natives of New Grenada are but imperfectly known. In Veragua a few small tribes have been described. In Costa Rica there are still Indians—but they speak, either wholly or generally, Spanish. The same is, probably, the case in Nicaragua. The Moskito Indians are dashed with both negro and white blood, and are Anglicized in respect to their civilization—such as it is. Of the West Indian Islanders none remain but the dark-coloured Caribs of St. Vincents. In Guatimala, Peruvianism re-appears; and architectural remains testify an industrial development—agriculture, and life in towns. The intertropical Andes have an Art of their own; essentially the same in Mexico and Peru; seen to the best advantage in those two countries, yet by no means wanting in the intermediate districts; remarkable in many respects, but not more remarkable than the existence of three climates under one degree of latitude.

Mexico, like Peru, has been isolated—and that on the same principle. Yet the Ægyptians of the New World cannot be shown to have exclusively belonged to any one branch of its population. In Guatimala and Yucatan—where the ruins are not inferior to those of the Astek[14] country—the language is the Maya, and it is as unreasonable to suppose that the Asteks built these, as to attribute the Astek ruins to Mayas. It is an illegitimate assumption to argue that, because certain buildings were contained within the empire of Montezuma, they were therefore Astek in origin or design. More than twenty other nations occupied that vast kingdom; and in most parts of it, where stone is abundant, we find architectural remains.

Architecture, cities, and the consolidation of empire which they determine, keep along the line of the Andes. They also stand in an evident ratio to the agricultural conditions of the soil and climate. The Chaco and Pampa habits which stood so much in contrast with the industrial civilization of Peru, and so coincided with the open prairie character of the country, re-appear in Texas. They increase in the great valley of the Mississippi. Nevertheless the Indians of Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and the old forests were partially agricultural. They were also capable of political consolidation. Powhattan, in Virginia, ruled over kings and sub-kings even as Montezuma did. Picture-writing—so-called—of which much has been said as a Mexican characteristic, is being found every day to be commoner and commoner amongst the Indians of the United States and Canada.

In an alluvial soil the barrow replaces the pyramid. The vast sepulchral mounds of the Valley of the Mississippi are the subjects of one of the valuable works[15] of the present time.

The Natchez, known to the novelist from the romance of Chateaubriand, are known to the ethnologist as pre-eminent amongst the Indians of the Mississippi for their Mexican characteristics. They flattened the head, worshiped the sun, kept up an undying fire, recognized a system of caste, and sacrificed human victims. Yet to identify them with the Asteks, to assume even any extraordinary intercourse, would be unsafe. Their traditions, indeed, suggest the idea of a migration; but their language contradicts their traditions. They are simply what the other natives of Florida were. I see in the accounts of the early Appalachians little but Mexicans and Peruvians minus their metals, and gems, and mountains.