ionship of the dog as represented by the shabby curs that snarled round Iroquois and Ojibbeway wigwams. The Aztecs, even, notwithstanding their highly wrought existence, were in this respect no more than on a level with the cave-dwellers of the Old World. Only the Peruvians employed llamas as beasts of burden, and kept alpacas for the sake of their fine fleeces. But oxen were unknown alike south and north of the isthmus, and a mounted man was a portent in all parts of the double continent.

As regards serviceable creatures, accordingly, Europe got next to nothing from America and gave much. The turkey, found wild in Mexico, is the only addition to our domestic stock afforded by the Western hemisphere. Valuable plants, on the other hand, it has yielded by the score. Tobacco, for good or ill, created a want which it is now indispensable to supply.

No contribution [remarks Professor Shaler] from newly discovered lands has ever been so new faith has ever travelled so fast and far among men as the habit of smoking. In scarce a century from the first introduction of the plant in Europe, its use had spread to nearly half the peoples in the Old World.

welcomed as this so-called noxious weed. No

Chilian and Peruvian Andes, was first cultivated in Peru. Nor would it have been easy, in the early days of its somewhat laborious education, to forecast the coming fortunes of an unpromising groundnut. Among other vegetable acquisitions from the New World, we need only mention the bark of the cinchona tree, all the varieties of cocoa and chocolate, vanilla, tomatoes, and pineapples.

Its human products offer a curious and a melancholy problem. The "noble savage" had it there all his own way. Nothing hindered the realization of his ideal of life. There was room, and to spare, for his shiftless wanderings; he found game to hunt, and enemies to scalp; no hostile system of civilization loomed above his horizon; he was exempt from repression and restraint. Yet he was not satisfied. He looked back vaguely to a time when things had been better with him; he hoped dimly for a coming deliverance from the evils of a barely tolerable present. The diffusion of what may be called a Messianic tradition among the natives of both Americas is a circumstance of most curious interest. Each tribe cherished the expectation of a kind of millennium, when a mysterious benefactor, who had long ago, during a brief golden age, taught useful arts to his special people, would return to reign in

Maize was the only kind of grain culti-peace over them forever. The predesvated on the new continent. But it was tined hero, moreover, was a white man, to be found everywhere. Its range ex- and was to come from the East with a rettends from the Rio Negro to the Lake of inue of other white men. The Aztecs the Woods; nor could any plant be better and Peruvians, the Mayas of Yucatan, the suited to supply the staff of life for an Algonquin Indians, even the cannibals unsettled and uncivilized population. It of Hispaniola, far apart as they were in might, indeed, be designated the cereal of other respects, all held unanimously to this the savage, as affording the maximum of hope of a national redemption. "Here," food with the minimum of cultivation. we may say with Dr. Daniel G. Brinton,* Indian corn is tolerant to the utmost limit "was one of those unconscious propheof vegetable endurance. Under the least cies, pointing to the advent of a white favorable circumstances it will still pa- race from the East, that wrote the doom tiently germinate and ripen its heavy ears. of the red man in letters of fire." So the Forest lands need not even be cleared to arrival of the Spaniards was no surprise. provide a field, for its bearing. It needs, It was looked for, and longed for, in reto be sure, light and air, but will accom-gions thousands of miles distant from one modate itself to unfelled trunks. Overflowing harvests can thus be garnered at short notice in the backwoods; and but for the aid of such facile supplies it is doubted whether the early colonists of American could have held their ground amid the adverse circumstances of their lot. The introduction of maize into the agriculture of the rest of the world could not then fail to prove of fundamental importance. Only the diffusion of the potato could be compared with it. Our indispensable tuber, indigenous in the

another, before Cortez was born, or Columbus set sail from Palos. The prediction that it fulfilled, however, proved to be of the ironical sort that devils might be supposed to take delight in. Those who had sown the wind reaped the whirlwind. Deliverance from blood-orgies came to them with their own destruction.

Most remarkable indeed it is that a cruel and sanguinary race like the Aztecs should have sighed for a Saturnian regi.

Myths of the New World, p. 186.

The

men — should of themselves have been | life far more settled and refined than that able so much as to conceive the character of their successors or descendants. of its mild champion. Quetzalcoatl was mound-builders of Ohio, the cliff-dwellers emphatically a "prince of peace; " he of Arizona, the Mayas of Yucatan, rewas a type of Christian sanctity, and his corded themselves in works as remote from special symbol was the cross. It seems the capacity of the sordid nomads who only reasonable to suppose that derivative scarcely even wonder at them, as the ruins elements were embodied in so pure an of Palmyra are from that of the pillaging ideal. And the presence of such elements Bedouin. And who can doubt that the is, besides, obvious in various traits of Aztecs and the Incas would have gone the native American culture. It was formerly same way as the Toltecs and the Quichés the fashion to detect them universally; it had not degeneracy been anticipated by is now the fashion to ignore them persis- destruction? There were no roots of tently. But there are some that take a steady improvement in either system of great deal of explaining away. Thus the social organization, and that of Mexico, at formal worship of the cross at Palenque any rate, held, in the atrocities upon and Cuzco can hardly have been paid to it which it was founded, the sure promise of as a mere symbol of the four winds; nor speedy decline. were, we may be sure, the prayers addressed to the "Tree of Life" by Aztecs and Toltecs wholly devoid of moral purport. The Egyptian Tau-the sign of life also occurs on Central American monuments; and the hooked cross, or swastika, more doubtfully on objects disinterred from the ancient "mounds" of Ohio; and neither can for a moment be supposed of local re-invention. Then the Mexican months were named unmistakably (as Humboldt pointed out) from the Tartar zodiac; and Mr. E. B. Tyler has adverted to the Asiatic origin of the Aztec game patolli. Another strong "note" of Oriental influence is in the absolute dependence of Aztec departed souls upon canine guidance † through the underworld; and the Aztec deluge tradition followed the Biblical account so closely as to exclude the hypothesis of a separate origin.

In the main, however, the culture of the American peoples was certainly indigenous. The red race worked out its own destinies down to the white conquest, and developed its own capabilities with singularly little interference from without. There is nothing to show how much time was spent in the process. Historical inquiries fail to ascend beyond the twelfth century of our era. All remoter events are veiled in a mist of dense ignorance. It can plainly be seen, however, that uniform progress did not prevail in any part of the continent. Advances in civilization, on the contrary, were constantly outbalanced by relapses into savagery. Over wide expanses of territory vanished populations left monuments and vestiges of a

So the cross was called in Mexican. † Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 300,

The ethnic unity of all the native American tribes, exclusive of the Esquimaux, is strongly indicated. Indian languages, indeed, are of most bewildering variety. They are reckoned by the hundred, and show very little trace of verbal relationship. But they are alike structurally, and are widely separated from all other families of speech. They are of the kind known as agglutinative," and afford powers of expression far beyond the needs of those who actually employ them. Social progress, too, wherever it was set on foot, took the same direction. The highest stage within view on the continent was that of an organized communism. Private property in land was unknown; cultivation in common, or of periodically redistributed lots, was the rule of every settled polity, and produced its inevitable effects of blocking the way against individual effort, and of creating and maintaining a low and stagnant level of inert uniformity. This prevalence of the communistic ideal has been attributed to the total suppression, in the New World, of the pastoral form of life; and this, again, was mainly or entirely due to the scarcity there of animals fitted for domestication. So that innate tendency was aided by external condi tions.

The typical American Indian religion was probably in the abstract monotheistic, but it was certainly in practice polytheistic. Here, as elsewhere, the primitive higher conception seems to have become overlaid with vile or grotesque imaginings. And these led universally to the atrocities of human sacrifice. Even among the mild Peruvians, a child or beautiful maiden some dusky Iphigenia or Andromeda was, on solemn occasions, immolated pro bono publico, in honor of the sun-god.

From The Cornhill Magazine.

Yet the subjects of the Incas were unique in their possession of some elementary "THE LITTLE NAPOLEON OF CARIBOU." notions of humanity; they abhorred wanton cruelty, and abstained from the feasts A STRANGER from New York City first of cannibalism. These were otherwise christened Judge Woods "The Little Na hideously general. From the St. Law-poleon of Caribou." As every man in the rence to Tierra del Fuego, the natives of crowd had a mine for sale, no one quesAmerica devoured their kind, often amid tioned the visitor's right to speak on this orgies of appalling cruelty. None were subject, and when he followed up the remore deeply stained with this horrible mark by saying "it was a long time beguilt than the refined Aztecs. Their chief tween drinks," we accepted his invitation god was unappeasable except by holo- and unanimously voted him a high authorcausts of human victims; their teocallis ity on the personal appearance of Napowere periodically drenched with human leon later in the day the entire camp blood; human hearts were torn out quiv-accepted the name as singularly appropriering on their altars; human flesh was ate. The mild, harmless face of Judge their prime gastronomic treat. Neverthe Woods, showing in every line a decided less, they had carried the arts of life to a antipathy to killing anything, could not very high pitch. Their goldsmith's work but suggest to our minds the little general excited the admiration of Benvenuto Cel. famous for killing everything. So he was lini; their astronomers had anticipated christened Napoleon; he reminded us of the Gregorian reform of the calendar; that singular man in the same way MurAnahuac abounded, at the time of the dock, the biggest liar in Caribou, reminded conquest, with splendid products of archi- us of George Washington, "he was so tectural and engineering skill. But their entirely different." progress had brought with it no amelioration of manners.

Nobody any longer doubts that the red men once arrived as strangers in the pair of continents they were so effectually to appropriate. But whence did they come? There need be little hesitation about the answer. Only one practicable approach can be pointed out. Isolated castaways may indeed have been blown, from time to time, across to the Pacific shore, from Japan or more southerly islands; but waves of migration can only have flowed by that north-west corner where America and Asia come as near to meeting as France and England do at the Straits of Dover. The avenue to the New World was by Behring Strait, or the neighboring line of the Aleutian Islands. Its preAryan population must accordingly have been derived, at some unknown epoch, or epochs, from northern Asia. The movement eastward impressed upon it by an impulse, obscure perhaps at the time, and now hopelessly past imaginative recall, made part of the universal wandering of the nations, through which the earth came to be peopled and possessed. To the ethnical affinities of those primitive immigrants we have at present no certain clue. All that can be asserted is that, as M. de Nadaillac says, "between the men of the New World and those of the Old there exists no essential physical difference. The unity of the human race stands out as the great law dominating the history of humanity."

LIVING AGE.

VOL. LXXIX. 4102

I think the judge took kindly to his new title, for in a short time the walls of his cabin blossomed with pictures of the great general, and he fell into the habit of walking around the camp with arms clasped behind his back and head bent forward as if he was burdened with great cares of the State. Entering his cabin without knocking one morning, I found him standing before a looking-glass trying to counterfeit Napoleon's position, as shown in one of the pictures on the wall. Glancing at the picture, then at his own reflection, he burst out in his rough fashion," Hang me if I don't think that New York man was right;" drawing himself up to his full length, he went on, "But I'm a bigger man than Napoleon - a bigger man.' did not contradict him; no one in the camp ever contradicted the judge; we all loved him too much; loved him in spite of his peculiarities; perhaps on account of them.

I

Judge Woods was a privileged character in the little mining camp of Caribou; nearly every one had commenced by laughing at him, all, I believe, ended by loving him, and in 1874, when the camp was at its best, he was the leading spirit in our social and political life. Lazy and good-humored, possessing a happy faculty of parrying angry words with some harmless joke, he slowly made his influence felt and power recognized by even the roughest class of miners in Caribou. He seemed to have no settled purpose, no special object in life. He did nothing, was nothing;

but day by day he grew more closely into | I came out here five years ago and settled the life of the place. No event was com- in that little cabin on the side of the hill; plete without him, and the appearance of his round, jolly face in any gathering was always the signal for a fusion of cliques and a good time all round. Every one in Caribou knew his history, who he was, where he came from, why he was here. You were sure to have this information fired at you by the judge the first time you made his acquaintance.

longer. I decided not to go back east, but stay here in Caribou. The old man didn't object, so here you find me at the end of five years, doing nothing, with the peculiar energy I have been famous for ever since I came to Colorado. I hope to stay here until I die. If I am bound in the right direction, then my soul will be saved a climb of over ten thousand feet; and if I have to go down below, the extra time consumed in reaching it will be my gain."

the one with a small platform running all along the front of it. At first it went kind of slow, then I began to like the boys, and they stopped calling me Tender foot.' In a little while I seemed to forget my eastern home, and ceased to long for my old companions. The two years of my probation at last came to an end, I was free to go home again, but home seemed "Yes, by Gad," he would begin. "I right here, all around me, for I had grown have known life-life, sir, I repeat-life to love the boys and the camp. The very in the very heart of the cultured eastern mountains that surrounded the little valley states. I have had my fling. Gad, boy, on all sides had crept into my heart, and I it was a royal fling too. Wine, you bet; | loved them too. The thought of opening woman, I should remark; gamble, why, my eyes in the morning and looking out you benighted tender foot, they don't know on nothing but brick walls, of having the meaning of the word gamble out here; no bright good-morning' from Arapaho in our game of poker we played for stakes Peak yonder, made me shrink with averworth winning; if a man threw the bankersion from my old life, my old home - a a $50 bill, he got one white chip, only half life and a home that seemed mine no an ante ; "and here the judge would stop and wag his large head from side to side, until it seemed the old-fashioned crush opera-hat he sported would fall to the ground; across his face all the while played a smile of happy superiority. Busy with the memory of old dissipations, he would forget your presence, and, looking out of the window, whistle softly some air linked in his mind with other days; coming back to the present, he would continue his story. "The old man cut up rough at last; my governor, you see, was a high officer in the church, and didn't exactly cotton to my larks. One morning he called me to his study; I did not like his looks; I knew there was trouble coming. 'Billy,' said he - Billy Woods is my The judge's cabin, like its owner, had name, you know, I'll be thirty-nine in De- its peculiarities. It was built on the side cember; don't look it, do I? well, I am of a steep hill; the judge's town lot, as he 'Billy,' said the old man, 'you have de- put it, being narrow but powerful high. veloped a surprising talent for profanity. While the back door elbowed the surIf this was natural or hereditary I might rounding rocks with true western_famil excuse you, but for generations our family | iarity, the front of the house, perched on have been leaders in religious matters. a row of pine timbers, lifted its head high To speak plainly, William, you raise too in air with natural eastern reserve and much trouble for this small city; it won't pride of position. The cabin contained do; you overstock the market. I think two rooms, a small bedroom, and a much you had better go west, where the people larger one, in which the judge seemed to are educated up to your style. I have the live. Twice each week it was used as a misfortune to own a mine called the "Sov-court-room, the judge being our only jusereign People; "it is situated near Cari-tice of the peace. This large room was bou, Colorado. Now I want you to go out to Caribou and stay for two years; I will send you each month two hundred dollars to pay expenses. At the end of two years, if you have learned to behave properly, you may come home again, and I will take you into partnership with me.' I tried to move the old man, but it was no go. So

This little autobiography, always interrupted by two or three adjournments to the bar-room, was sure to end in a cordial invitation to visit his cabin, sample his old rye whiskey, and smoke a pipe of peace.

papered from floor to ceiling with old copies of illustrated papers; they were in all languages and from all lands. An elk head was nailed above the fireplace, and a wonderful collection of stuffed birds and animals were strung around the room, filling completely the space between the point where the papering ended and the

famous. About twenty of us lived there; a dozen more, sleeping in their own cabins, gathered under its roof three times a day to eat a little and drink a great deal. We made a queer party, thirty-two men hailing from almost as many different parts of the world — stray bits of wreckage from all round the globe-stranded at last in this out-of-the-way mining camp, nestling in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, ten thousand feet above the sea.

roof began. An old-fashioned church pul- | balls, church meetings, and shooting afpit, discarded by the Methodist society fairs had each in turn done some little when they repaired their chapel, stood in towards making and keeping the house one corner of the room for the use of the judge on court days; a lot of rough pine boards piled up in a corner made benches for the jury, the witnesses, and lawyers. The only evidence of luxury or suggestion of his old home in the east, was a large easy-chair that always stood in front of the window, through which could be seen Arapaho Peak, fifteen thousand feet high. This was the judge's favorite corner. Here he would sit by the hour when the days were cold or stormy, smoking his large pipe. He always had a book open before him, but it was noticed he seldom turned the leaves, but with eyes fastened on the snow-covered peak across the valley, sat quietly dreaming the hours away. Of what he thought or dreamed, we, his friends in the camp, could not tell; perhaps we could not have understood his thoughts had we known them; that he loved the old mountain was plain; that he turned to it a far different side of his character from the jolly, good-tempered one known in the camp, we suspected. Perhaps his sorrows, if he had any, and Heaven knows we all have some, were told to his cold and silent friend, "The Peak.'

Many an afternoon I have looked across the valley from my shaft to the judge's little cabin, as the sun went down, to see him bid it good-night.

In the morning at the breakfast-table, when the dim light filtering in through dirty windows gave to face and figure a strange, unreal appearance, they were a rough lot to look upon. Conversation was limited, for each man was busy with thoughts of the day's chances. A poor man now, to-night he might be a millionaire, and, snapping his fingers, turn his back on the camp forever. This possibility made our speech and action quick and nervous, as if begrudging the few moments required to consume the necessary amount of food. It was at such a time and surrounded by such men the judge showed to advantage. Leaning back in his chair in spite of the rush, somehow he would find time to work in the thin edge of some good story. We couldn't but stop a moment and laugh, and this laugh seemed to clear the atmosphere, let off our surplus stock of nervous excitement, and establish a good feeling all round the table. But if the judge was entertaining at breakfast, he waxed positively brilliant in the evening. For it was then our life in camp took on its brightest side.

If the day was clear, you were sure to see him at this hour pacing up and down the narrow platform in front of his cabin, every few moments stopping to look across the valley where the glory of the sunset rested. At last, striking an attitude Na- In the long winter nights we all gathered poleonic in the extreme, with head crit- around the large fireplace in the bar-room; ically balanced on one side, he would with chairs tilted back, legs crossed, and stand and watch the close of the day. hands clasped behind our heads, we would Nodding in a familiar way to the sun as sit and smoke while the judge spun yarns. it dropped behind the mountain, his every Many of them were old, some were poor, movement seemed to say, "Very well but somehow we never got tired of hearing done to-night, old boy-very well done them. The room was dimly lighted; outindeed. I could suggest a few improve-side the wind whistled, dashing the snow ments, but what's the good? Every one is satisfied with the show as you give it, so don't change on my account."

When the bright color in the west had faded, and the stars began to cluster around Arapaho Peak and blossom far and wide, he would close his door and come slowly down the narrow path leading from his cabin to the Caribou House, where he took all his meals.

The Caribou House was the centre of social life in camp; political conventions,

in passionate gusts against the windowpanes. The purring of the wood fire, dropping lower and lower as the evening waned, the shadows above and around us, all seemed to draw our little circle closer and closer together; and the judge's soft voice seemed just to fit in with the surroundings.

He appeared to have such a childlike belief in all his old stock lies. I suppose they had developed slowly from small, perhaps truthful beginnings, right under