INDIAN HOME LIFE. IO9 



the time of Carib supremacy in the Lesser Antilles, 

 were residents of the country north of Florida, and 

 that a different tribe, the Yemassees, inhabited the 

 peninsula. 



Very naturally arises the question, whence came 

 this people ? This must remain unanswered until 

 our savants have determined the origin of the entire 

 race of which these Indians are but a fragmentary 

 portion. They may trace them to Jew or Tartar, to 

 Malay or Phoenician, for their remote origin; but 

 to the ethnologist who believes in an original Amer- 

 ican civilization, that there was for ages an emigra- 

 tion from South America northward, a little light may 

 be afforded by tracing the confines of the Carib. 



Considering the Esquimaux and the North Amer- 

 ican Indians to be an " immigrant element" from Asia, 

 we must look to the South for the origin of those other 

 tribes more advanced than they in civilization. The 

 Mound-builders of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, 

 and the Cliff-dwellers of Colorado and Arizona, may 

 be traced to Mexico as the country from which they 

 sprung. The Aztecs, in the height of their power 

 when discovered by the Spaniards, pointed to South 

 America as the land from which they had invaded 

 Mexico. Those learned men are not few who trace 

 a connection from these peoples to that wonderful 

 race that built the aqueducts of Peru and the roads 

 of the Incas ; and who maintain further that Amer- 

 ican civilization had its beginning in the elevated val- 

 leys of Peru. 



These Caribs have no affinity with the people who 

 built such wonderful cities and wrought such works 

 of art as now lie scattered throughout the vast for- 



