Page:The American Indian.djvu/423

Rh been very aptly said that the fundamentals of Old World culture are expressed by the terms "cereals, cattle, plough, and wheel." Yet, what have we found in the New World that can be set down as specifically similar to these? We are left, therefore, little choice but to recognize that the cultures of the New World peoples were developed independently of the ancient centers of higher culture in the Old.

The old argument against such a conclusion was that the barbarous Indian was incompetent to develop the cultures of Yucatan and Peru. This view is now somewhat antiquated, but still lingers as a kind of intellectual reaction in the minds of modern Europeans. Perhaps back of it is a habit of thought, since in Old World culture, in which we ourselves live and think, fundamental traits are often found to have a single origin. For example, the horse, ox, wheat, glass, printing, gunpowder, etc., seem to have had each a single place of origin from which they were diffused. Yet, in contemplating New World culture we must not forget that the comparisons between the two hemispheres should be specific. It will not do, for instance, to say that because agriculture is found in both the Old and New Worlds, one must have been derived from the other, for we are here dealing with a mere abstraction, like eating, writing, fishing, etc. The proper method is to examine the agricultural traits found in each hemisphere. Thus, one basic factor in agriculture is the development of specific food plants. Let us, therefore, compare the plants cultivated by the Indian with those grown in the Old World.

De Candolle has listed more than forty plants grown by the Indians whose wild ancestors were, without reasonable doubt, peculiar to the New World. On the other hand, the ancestors of the leading food plants of the Old World have been found peculiar to it. Thus, we find that each hemisphere developed agriculture by drawing upon its own peculiar flora and that in consequence their seed lists had nothing in common before 1492. Now, when we consider the rapidity with which maize, tobacco, and other New World plants were taken up in the Old World after the commemorable voyage of Columbus, it is