BACKGAMMON AMONG THE AZTECS. 501 



and plum-stones. It is an interesting question whether " the poor In- 

 dian, whose untutored mind " has now and then been too easily credited 

 with the invention of all the arts and beliefs he did not get from the 

 white men, may not really before this have largely taken up in his cul- 

 ture ideas of Old-World growth. It has long been noticed that, looking 

 at the native tribes of what is now the United States and the Dominion 

 of Canada, the tribes on the east side had taken to making pottery and 

 cultivating maize, while the tribes on the west had not, which seems as 

 thoutrh there had been a flow or drift of civilization from the Central 

 American district up the eastern half of the continent, which of itself 

 ought to be enough to prevent any ethnologists from looking at the so- 

 called red-man of New England or the Lakes as the creator of his whole 

 industrial and social life. Nor is it an unknown thing that the myth 

 and religion of the North American tribes contain many fancies well 

 known to Asia, which the men of the prairies were hardly likely to have 

 hit upon independently, but which they certainly did not learn from the 

 white men, who did not even know them. If we are bound, as I think 

 we are, to open a theoretical road for even a well-marked game to migrate 

 by from Asia into America, then there are plenty of other matters wait- 

 ing for passage along the route. By such conveyance of ideas it may be 

 easiest to explain why the so-called Indians of North America shared 

 with the real Indians of India the quaint belief that the world is a 

 monstrous tortoise floating on the waters, or why the Sioux Indians 

 share with the Tartars the idea that it is sinful to chop or poke with a 

 sharp instrument the burning logs on the fire. But these considerations 

 lead too far into the deepest-lying problems of the connection and 

 intercourse of nations to be here pursued further. It is remarkable, too, 

 how vast a geographical range the argument on the migrations of a 

 game may cover. The American farmer now whiles away the winter 

 evening in his farmhouse parlor with a hit at backgammon, on the 

 spot where, not long since, the Iroquois played peach-stones in his bark 

 hut. Neither would have recognized the other's sport as akin to his 

 own, though when we trace them through the intermediate stages they 

 are seen to be both birds of one nest. It is by strangely different routes 

 that they have at last come together from their Asiatic home — one per- 

 haps eastward through Asia, across the Pacific, into Mexico, and north- 

 ward to the St. Lawrence ; the other, no doubt, westward down to the 

 Mediterranean, up northward to England, over the Atlantic, and so out 

 into the American praii'ie.' — 3Iacmilla)t's Marjazine. 



' For special details, copies of original documents, etc., see a paper by the author 

 " On the Game of Patolli in Ancient Mexico, and its probably Asiatic Origin," read be- 

 fore the Anthropological Institute on April 9, 1S78. 



