Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/188

176 that this is a region containing gold and other precious substances. The facts that we possess about the beginnings of Mexican civilisation are therefore such as to suggest that its founders possessed ideas similar to those which actuated the Chinese and other highly civilised peoples. They sought especially gold and other precious substances, and their early settlements seem to have been chosen as the result of this search. In their subsequent wanderings the descendants of the Maya looked back upon their homeland as a place abounding in life-giving substances. In other parts of North America the earliest civilised peoples that we have traces of appear to have settled in places where they could obtain supplies of gold, silver, turquoise and so forth. And the beliefs of the peoples living in those regions in post-Columbian times, which are doubtless founded upon those of the earlier inhabitants, show clearly that such substances as turquoise, pearls and so on were looked upon by the first colonists as givers of life. Moreover, in the migration legends of the Pueblo Indians, mention is constantly made of the search for the middle, the navel of the earth, which when found seems to have been located with reference to life-giving substances.

Some will object to the suggestion that American civilisation was founded by strangers. But it must be admitted that the hypothesis of the search for the Isles of the Blest provides a plausible explanation of the fact that the first civilised settlements that we know of in Central and North America were in places where there were givers of life. This explanation at least serves to confirm the tradition of men coming in search of the earthly paradise, and the claim made by later American peoples that their first home was such a paradise. It looks as if there were a continuity in the process of the development of Mexican