Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/176

164 section, whether the term had best be kept up or amended, or a new term substituted. It is quite worth while to discuss the name, considering what an important question of anthropology is involved in the institution it expresses. In this region there were found Iroquois, Algonquins, Dakotas, separate in language, and yet whose social life was regulated by the matriarchal totem structure. May it not be inferred from such a state of things, that social institutions form a deeper-lying element in man than language or even physical race type? This is a problem which presents itself for serious discussion, when the evidence can be brought more completely together.

It is obvious that, in this speculation, as in other problems now presenting themselves in anthropology, the question of the antiquity of man lies at the basis. Of late no great progress has been made toward fixing a scale of calculation of the human period, but the arguments as to time required for alterations in valley-levels, changes of fauna, evolution of races, languages, and culture, seem to converge more conclusively than ever toward a human period short indeed as a fraction of geological time, but long as compared with historical or chronological time. While, however, it is felt that length of time need not debar the anthropologists from hypotheses of development and migration, there is more caution as to assumptions of millions of years where no arithmetical basis exists, and less tendency to treat everything prehistoric as necessarily of extreme antiquity, such as, for instance, the Swiss lake-dwelling and the Central American temples. There are certain problems of American anthropology which are not the less interesting for involving no considerations of high antiquity; indeed, they have the advantage of being within the check of history, though not themselves belonging to it.

Humboldt's argument as to traces of Asiatic influence in Mexico is one of these. The four ages in the Aztec picture-writings, ending with catastrophes of the four elements, earth, fire, air, water, compared by him with the same scheme among the Banyans of Surat, is a strong piece of evidence which would become yet stronger if the Hindoo book could be found from which the account is declared to have been taken. Not less cogent is his comparison of the zodiacs or calendar-cycles of Mexico and Central America with those of Eastern Asia, such as that by which the Japanese reckon the sixty-year cycle by combining the elements seriatim with the twelve animals, Mouse, Bull, Tiger, Hare, etc.; the present year is, I suppose, the second water-ape year, and the time of day is the goat-hour. Humboldt's case may be re-enforced by the consideration of the magical employment of these zodiacs in the Old and New World. The description of a Mexican astrologer, sent for to make the arrangements for a marriage by comparing the zodiac animals of the birthdays of bride and bridegroom, might have been written almost exactly of the modern Calmucks; and in fact it seems connected in origin with similar rules in our own books of astrology.