Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/211

 small beginnings in the country where it subsequently attained its full development, or was imported in its embryonic state from the Oriental Archipelago. There are some things which indicate that its germs were derived from the latter source. On Ascension and Easter Islands there are large structures of stone with huge columnar engraved monuments. Remains of similar character are reported from the Sandwich, Kingsmill, the Ladrones, Navigator's, and other islands of the Pacific; and it is evident that, in times so ancient that all memory of them is lost, a people inhabited these islands who had many of the arts of civilization, and who were essentially and characteristically workers in stone. The similarity of the works on these different islands indicates their progressive occupation by a people who were compelled, in passing from one to another of their stopping-places, to traverse as great a breadth of ocean as separates some of these from the American continent; and it is not improbable that the final resting-place of this people was upon the western coast of the great double continent, of which the continuous Cordilleras, like a great wall, arrested their eastward migration. Here they spread from their center of radiation to Chili on the south and to Utah on the north, elaborating in the course of time a civilization that was locally colored by the varying conditions of existence, but retaining enough of its original character to show that it was all an outgrowth from a common root.

If this was the history of our Mexican and Peruvian civilization, its original founders must have belonged to the same general stock with those who built the architectural monuments of India, and erected in the island of Java those wonderful temples now buried in the forests, and in ruins.

Still, the time of separation must have been so remote, and the culture of the period so low, that each form of civilization grew up independently of the others, and they now show little relationship.

It is the opinion of geologists that a great continent once occupied portions of the present areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans—a continent to which they have given the name Lemuria—and it is speculated that this was the cradle of the human race.

Be that as it may, from this section of the earth the brown Polynesians, Malays, Tahitans, Sandwich-Islanders, and Maoris spread, carrying with them characteristics and faculties which might very well be developed into a civilization such as that found on this continent by the European whites; and there is direct and collateral evidence that they sometimes landed on our shores.

Considering the balancing probabilities, I may say that it seems to be most probable that the west coast of America was