Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/517

Rh and plum-stones. It is an interesting question whether "the poor Indian, whose untutored mind" has now and then been too easily credited with the invention of all the arts and beliefs he did not get from the white men, may not really before this have largely taken up in his culture ideas of Old-World growth. It has long been noticed that, looking at the native tribes of what is now the United States and the Dominion of Canada, the tribes on the east side had taken to making pottery and cultivating maize, while the tribes on the west had not, which seems as though there had been a flow or drift of civilization from the Central American district up the eastern half of the continent, which of itself ought to be enough to prevent any ethnologists from looking at the so called red-man of New England or the Lakes as the creator of his whole industrial and social life. Nor is it an unknown thing that the myth and religion of the North American tribes contain many fancies well known to Asia, which the men of the prairies were hardly likely to have hit upon independently, but which they certainly did not learn from the white men, who did not even know them. If we are bound, as I think we are, to open a theoretical road for even a well-marked game to migrate by from Asia into America, then there are plenty of other matters waiting for passage along the route. By such conveyance of ideas it may be easiest to explain why the so-called Indians of North America shared with the real Indians of India the quaint belief that the world is a monstrous tortoise floating on the waters, or why the Sioux Indians share with the Tartars the idea that it is sinful to chop or poke with a sharp instrument the burning logs on the fire. But these considerations lead too far into the deepest-lying problems of the connection and intercourse of nations to be here pursued further. It is remarkable, too, how vast a geographical range the argument on the migrations of a game may cover. The American farmer now whiles away the winter evening in his farmhouse parlor with a hit at backgammon, on the spot where, not long since, the Iroquois played peach-stones in his bark hut. Neither would have recognized the other's sport as akin to his own, though when we trace them through the intermediate stages they are seen to be both birds of one nest. It is by strangely different routes that they have at last come together from their Asiatic home—one perhaps eastward through Asia, across the Pacific, into Mexico, and northward to the St. Lawrence; the other, no doubt, westward down to the Mediterranean, up northward to England, over the Atlantic, and so out into the American prairie. —Macmillan's Magazine.