Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/217

Rh MEXICO 207 scale) ; eyes black ; straight coarse glossy black hair ; beard and moustache scanty. Among variations from this type may be mentioned higher stature in some districts, and lighter complexion in Tehuantepec and elsewhere. If now the native Americans be compared with the races of the regions across the oceans to their east and west, it will be seen that their unlikeness is extreme to the races east ward of them, whether white Europeans or black Africans. On the other hand they are considerably like the Mongoloid peoples of North and East Asia (less so to the Polynesians) ; so that the tendency among anthropologists is now generally to admit a common origin, however remote, between the tribes of Tartary and of America. This original connexion, if it may be accepted, would seem to belong to a long-past period, to judge from the failure of all attempts to discover an affinity between the languages of America and Asia. At whatever date the Americans began to people America, they must have had time to import or develop the numerous families of languages actually found there, in none of which has community of origin been satisfactorily proved with any other language-group, at home or abroad. In Mexico itself the languages of the Nahua nations, of which the Aztec is the best-known dialect, show no connexion of origin with the language of the Otomi tribes, nor either of these with the languages of the regions of the ruined cities of Central America, the Quiche of Guatemala and the Maya of Yucatan. Indeed, within the Mexican limits, there are various other languages which, so far as philological research can at present decide, are independent of one another. The remarkable phenomenon of nations so similar in bodily make but so distinct in language can hardly be met except by supposing a long period to have elapsed since the country was first inhabited by the ancestors of peoples whose language has since passed into so different forms. The original peopling of America may well date from the time when there was continuous land between it and Asia. It would not follow, however, that between these remote ages and the time of the discovery of the New World by Columbus no fresh immigrants can have reached America. We may put out of the question the Scandinavian sea- rovers who sailed to Greenland about the 10th century, and appear afterwards to have coasted New England (see AMERICA, vol. i. p. 706), but do not seem to have found their way far enough southward for their visit to have any effect on Mexico. But at all times communication has been open from East Asia and even the South Sea islands to the west coast of America. The importance of this is evident when we consider that Japanese junks now drift over by the ocean current to California at the rate of about one a year, often with some of the crew still alive (see C. W. Brooks in Bancroft, vol. v. p. 51 ; Overland Monthly, San Francisco, 1872, p. 353). Further north, the Aleutian islands offer a line of easy sea passage, while in north-east Asia, near Behring s Strait, live Chukchi tribes who carry on inter course with the American side ; the presence of Eskimo in this part of Asia (see Nordenskiold, Voy.ofVega,o. ii. pp. 13, 81) is so plainly due to local migration that it is neglected in comparing the languages of the two continents. Asiatics such as Japanese or Kurile Islanders, if they found their way in small numbers to America and merged into native tribes, might hardly leave descendants distinguishable from the rest of the population even in the first genera tion, nor introduce their own language. Such assertions as that the Guatusos of Costa Rica are a tribe with fair skin and flaxen hair, and that Japanese words may be detected among the Indians of British Columbia, are examples of evidence which may be worth further sifting ; but in an account like the present no proofs can be admitted unless far better authenticated than these. What gives a more solid interest to the question of Asiatic influence in America, is that, though neither the evidence of features nor of language has substantiated it, there are details of Mexican civilization which are most easily accounted for on the supposition that they were borrowed from Asia. They do not seem ancient enough to have to do with a remote Asiatic origin of the nations of America, but rather to be results of comparatively modern intercourse between Asia and America, probably since the Christian era. Humboldt ( Vues des Cordilleres, pi. xxiii.) compared the Mexican calendar with that in use in eastern Asia. The Mongols, Tibetans, Chinese, and other neighbouring nations have a cycle or series of twelve animals, viz., rat, bull, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, goat, ape, cock, dog, pig, which may possibly be an imita tion of the ordinary Babylonian-Greek zodiac familiar to ourselves. The Mongolian peoples not only count their lunar months by these signs, but they reckon the successive days by them, rat-day, bull-day, tiger-day, &c., and also, by combining the twelve signs in rotation with the ele ments, they obtain a means of marking each year in the sixty-year cycle, as the wood-rat year, the fire-tiger year, &c. This method is highly artificial, consisting, not in mere numbering, but in combining series of different terms so that the same combination does not recur till the end of the period. Thus the reappearance of its principle in the Mexican and Central- American calendar (see p. 212) is sug gestive of importation from Asia. Humboldt also discussed the Mexican doctrine, represented in the native pictures, of four ages of the world belonging to water, earth, air, and fire, and ending respectively by deluge, earthquake, tempest, and conflagration. The resemblance of this to some versions of the Hindu doctrine of the four ages or yuga is of so remarkable a closeness as hardly to be accounted for except on the hypothesis that the Mexican theology con tains ideas learnt from Asiatics. Among Asiatic points of resemblance to which attention has since been called is the Mexican belief in the nine stages of heaven and hell, an idea which nothing in nature would suggest directly to a barbaric people, but which corresponds to the idea of successive heavens and hells among Brahmans and Buddhists, who apparently learnt it (in common with our own ancestors) from the Babylonian-Greek astronomical theory of successive stages or concentric planetary spheres belonging to the planets, &c. The Spanish chronicles also give accounts of a Mexican game called patolli, played at the time of the conquest with coloured stones moved on the squares of a cross-shaped figure, according to the throws of beans marked on one side ; the descriptions of this rather complicated game correspond closely with the Hindu backgammon called pachisi (see Tylor in Jour. Antkrop. List., vol. viii. p. 116). 1 The native history of Mexico and Central America is entitled to more respect than the mere recollections of savage tribes, inasmuch as here memory was aided by something like written record. The Mexican pictures so far approached writing proper as to set down legibly the names of persons and places and the dates of events, while the rude drawings which accompanied these at least helped the professional historians to remember the tradi tions repeated orally from generation to generation. Thus actual documents of native Aztec history, or copies of 1 The appendix to Prescott s Conquest of Mexico contains an interesting summary of analogies between the civilization of Mexico and that of the Old World, but some of the arguments are very incon clusive. One which has been often cited turns on the likeness alleged by Naxera between the Chinese language and that of the Otomi nation of Mexico (whose name survives in that of their town Otompan, now Otumba). The examination of an Otomi grammar (such as Elements de la Grammaire Othomi, Paris, 1863) will, however, convince the philological reader that the resemblance is hardly of an amount to found a theory of a Chinese connexion upon.