Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/513

Rh can not be brought into connection with the other or with any other group. Historically the small family may be as significant as the large, for it represents just as separate an origin.

Perhaps the best known and most important single tribe in America were the Aztecs, who founded and held the city of Mexico and ruled from there over a large part of the modern republic of that name. Excepting perhaps the Incas of Peru, they were the most powerful nation in the new world at the time of its discovery and conquest. Their

civilization, though for the most part borrowed from other tribes rather than invented, was also of the highest. As to their own origin the Aztecs had certain traditions, according to whose testimony they came