Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/185

Rh are expressly mentioned as containing vast stores of gold and jewels. Apparently the practical outcome of the possession of these beliefs has been to cause men to form their settlements where they found gold and other givers of life. And it is important to find that the highly civilised peoples of antiquity possessed these ideas in common. For this reason it is necessary to turn to one region of the earth where there formerly were important civilisations in order to inquire whether similar ideas existed in the past. The ancient civilisations of Central and South America were comparable with those of Europe, Asia and Africa. The pre-Columbian Mexicans were skilled metal-workers, and Cortes saw in the market of Mexico city baskets of gold, silver, tin, copper and lead waiting to be sold. The Mexicans associated gold with the sun and silver with the moon, as did the astrologers and alchemists of Europe and elsewhere. They also believe in the possibility of concocting an elixir of life.

Perhaps no question in ethnology is more hotly disputed than that of the origin of American civilisation. It is a question that cannot be left alone, especially nowadays when the whole foundation of the theory of independent development of culture is being sapped. In such circumstances as these, when speaking of movements of people about the earth, it is necessary to inquire what happens in the case of America. We find that the people of pre-Columbian Mexico had ideas concerning the elixir of life, and that they worked metals. These peoples had traditions with regard to the origin of their civilisation. One of them quoted by Brasseur de Bourbourg has been recorded by their historian Sahagun. Sahagun is speaking of the ancestors of the Nahua, the mythical or traditional