Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 11 (Latin American).djvu/25



HERE is an element of obvious incongruity in the use of the term "Latin American" to designate the native Indian myths of Mexico and of Central and South America. Unfortunately, we have no convenient geographical term which embraces all those portions of America which fell to Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, and in default of this, the term designating their culture, Latin in character, has come into use—aptly enough when its application is to transplanted Iberian institutions and peoples, but in no logical mode relating to the aborigines of these regions. More than this, there are no aboriginal unities of native culture and ideas which follow the divisions made by the several Caucasian conquests of the Americas. It is primarily as consequence of their conquest by Spaniards that Mexico and Central America fall with the southern continent in our thought; from the point of view of their primitive ethnology there is little evidence (at least for recent times) of southern influence until Yucatan and Guatemala are passed. There are, to be sure, striking resemblances between the Mexican and Andean aboriginal civilizations; and there are, again, broad similarities between the ideas and customs of the less advanced tribes of the two continents, such that we may correctly infer a certain racial character as typical of all American Indians; but amid these similarities there are grouped differences which, as between the continents, are scarcely less distinctive than are their fauna and flora,—say, calumet and eagle's plume as against blowgun and parrot's feather,—and these hold level for level: the Amazonian and the Inca