WAS MIDDLE AMERICA PEOPLED FROM ASIA? 5 



dressed as a Chinese, is not to be distinguished from them, and 

 Peschel classifies the Malays with the Mongoloid people. In these 

 approximate regions one might expect close intermixtures. If re- 

 semblances are established between the Japanese and the Eskimo, 

 they would probably have arisen from a circumpolar race which has 

 left its traces on northern peoples the world around. We turn 

 naturally to Japan as the region from which a migration might rea- 

 sonably have been supposed to take place. Its position on the Asiatic 

 coast with a series of larger and smaller stepping-stones — the Kuriles 

 — to Kamchatka, and thence across the strait to America and sea- 

 ward, the broad and powerful Japanese current sweeping by its 

 coast and across the Pacific, arrested only by the northwestern coast 

 of America. With these various avenues of approach one might 

 certainly expect evidences of contact in past times. A somewhat 

 extended study in Japan of its prehistoric and early historic remains 

 in the way of shell-heap pottery from the north to the south, much 

 of it of an exceedingly curious character; the later stone imple- 

 ments, many of them of the most extraordinary types; the bronze 

 mirrors, swords, spear points, and the so-called bronze bells ; the wide 

 distribution of a curious comma-shaped ornament of stone known 

 as the magatama, with a number of varieties, and many other kinds 

 of objects, leads me to say that no counterpart or even remote paral- 

 lelism has been found in the western hemisphere. Certain rude 

 forms of decoration of the northern shell-heap pottery of Japan, 

 such as the cord-mark and crenulated fillet, are world-wide in their 

 distribution, and a similar wide dispersal is seen of the rude stone im- 

 plements and notched and barbed bone and horn. Here, however, 

 the similarity ends. The lathe-turned unglazed mortuary vessels so 

 common in ancient graves in Japan and Korea have equally no coun- 

 terpart on our western coast. If now we examine the early records 

 of Japan in her two famous works — the Kojiki and Nikon ji, which 

 contain rituals, ceremonies, and historical data going back with con- 

 siderable accuracy to the third and fourth centuries of our era — we 

 shall find many curious details of customs and arts and references 

 to objects which have since been exhumed from burial mounds, yet 

 we look in vain for a similar cult in Mexico or Central America. 

 Turning aside from Japan as an impossible ground in which to trace 

 resemblances, we glance at the unique character of the ancient pot- 

 tery of Central America, with its representations of natural forms, 

 such as fishes, turtles, frogs, shells, etc., its peculiar motives of decora-^ 

 tion in color, and find no counterpart in Asia. The pyramidal rock 

 structure and rounded burial mounds are supposed to have their 

 counterparts in the East, but the pyramidal form is common in 

 various parts of the world, simply because it is the most economical 



