Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/177

Rh Magic is of great value in thus tracing communication, direct or indirect, between distant nations. The power of lasting and traveling which it possesses may be instanced by the rock-pictures from the sacred Roches Percées of Manitoba, sketched by Dr. Dawson, and published in his father's volume on "Fossil Man," with the proper caution that the pictures, or some of them, may be modern. Besides the rude pictures of deer and Indians and their huts, one sees with surprise a pentagram more neatly drawn than that defective one which let Mephistopheles pass Faust's threshold, though it kept the demon in when he had got there. Whether the Indians of Manitoba learned the magic figure from the white man, or whether the white man did it himself in jest, it proves a line of intercourse stretching back twenty-five hundred years to the time when it was first drawn as a geometrical diagram of the school of Pythagoras. To return to Humboldt's argument, if there was communication from Asia to Mexico before the Spanish Conquest, it ought to have brought other things, and no things travel more easily than games. I noticed some years ago that the Aztecs are described by the old Spanish writers as playing a game called patolli where they moved stones on the squares of a cross-shaped mat, according to the throws of beans marked on one side. The description minutely corresponds with the Hindoo game of pachisi, played in like manner with cowries instead of beans; this game, which is an early variety of backgammon, is well known in Asia, whence it seems to have found its way into America. From Mexico it passed into Sonora and Zacatecas, much broken down but retaining its name, and it may be traced still further into the game of plum-stones among the Iroquois and other tribes. Now, if the probability be granted that these various American notions came from Asia, their importation would not have to do with any remotely ancient connection between the two continents. The Hindoo element-catastrophes, the East Asiatic zodiac-calendars, the game of backgammon, seem none of them extremely old, and it may not be a thousand years since they reached America. These are cases in which we may reasonably suppose communication by seafarers, perhaps even in some of those junks which are brought across so often by the ocean-current and wrecked on the California coast. In connection with ideas borrowed from Asia there arises the question. How did the Mexicans and Peruvians become possessed of bronze? Seeing how imperfectly it had established itself, not even dispossessing the stone implements, I have long believed it to be an Asiatic importation of no great antiquity, and it is with great satisfaction that I find such an authority on prehistoric archæology as Professor Worsaae comparing the bronze implements in China and Japan with those of Mexico and Peru, and declaring emphatically his opinion that bronze was a modern novelty introduced into America. While these items of Asiatic culture in America are so localized as to agree best with the hypothesis of communication far south across the