Page:Myths of Mexico and Peru.djvu/458

 Conclusion

The advance in civilisation attained by the peoples of America must be regarded as among the most striking phenomena in the history of mankind, especially if it be viewed as an example of what can be achieved by isolated races occupying a peculiar environment. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the cultures and mythologies of old Mexico and Peru were evolved without foreign assistance or intervention, that, in fact, they were distinctively and solely the fruit of American aboriginal thought evolved upon American soil. An absorbing chapter in the story of human advancement is provided by these peoples, whose architecture, arts, graphic and plastic, laws and religions prove them to have been the equals of most of the Asiatic nations of antiquity, and the superiors of the primitive races of Europe, who entered into the heritage of civilisation through the gateway of the East. The aborigines of ancient America had evolved for themselves a system of writing which at the period of their discovery was approaching the alphabetic type, a mathematical system unique and by no means despicable, and an architectural science in some respects superior to any of which the Old World could boast. Their legal codes were reasonable and founded upon justice; and if their religions were tainted with cruelty, it was a cruelty which they regarded as inevitable, and as the doom placed upon them by sanguinary and Insatiable deities and not by any human agency.

In comparing the myths of the American races with the deathless stories of Olympus or the scarcely less classic tales of India, frequent resemblances and analogies cannot fail to present themselves, and these 328