AMERICAN ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 165 



Magic is of great value in thus tracing communication, direct or indi- 

 rect, between distant nations. The power of lasting and traveling 

 which it possesses may be instanced by the rock-pictures from the 

 sacred Roches Percees of Manitoba, sketched by Dr. Dawson, and 

 published in his father's volume on " Fossil Man," with the proper 

 caution that the pictures, or some of them, may be modern. Besides 

 the rude pictures of deer and Indians and their huts, one sees with sur- 

 prise a pentagram more neatly drawn than that defective one which 

 let Mephistopheles pass Faust's threshold, though it kept the demon 

 in when he had got there. Whether the Indians of Manitoba learned 

 the magic figure from the white man, or whether the white man did it 

 himself in jest, it proves a line of intercourse stretching back twenty- 

 five hundred years to the time when it was first drawn as a geometrical 

 diagram of the school of Pythagoras. To return to Humboldt's argu- 

 ment, if there was communication from Asia to Mexico before the 

 Spanish Conquest, it ought to have brought other things, and no things 

 travel more easily than games. I noticed some years ago that the 

 Aztecs are described by the old Spanish writers as playing a game 

 called patolli, where they moved stones on the squares of a cross-shaped 

 mat, according to the throws of beans marked on one side. The de- 

 scription minutely corresponds with the Hindoo game of pachisij played 

 in like manner with cowries instead of beans ; this game, which is an 

 early variety of backgammon, is well known in Asia, whence it seems 

 to have found its way into America. From Mexico it passed into 

 Sonora and Zacatecas, much broken down but retaining its name, and 

 it may be traced still further into the game of plum-stones among the 

 Iroquois and other tribes. Now, if the probability be granted that 

 these various American notions came from Asia, their importation 

 would not have to do with any remotely ancient connection between 

 the two continents. The Hindoo element-catastrophes, the East Asiatic 

 zodiac-calendars, the game of backgammon, seem none of them ex- 

 tremely old, and it may not be a thousand years since they reached 

 America. These are cases in which we may reasonably suppose com- 

 munication by seafarers, perhaps even in some of those junks which 

 are brought across so often by the ocean-current and wrecked on the 

 California coast. In connection with ideas borrowed from Asia there 

 arises the question. How did the Mexicans and Peruvians become pos- 

 sessed of bronze ? Seeing how imperfectly it had established itself, 

 not even dispossessing the stone implements, I have long believed it to 

 be an Asiatic importation of no great antiquity, and it is with great 

 satisfaction that I find such an authority on prehistoric archaeology as 

 Professor Worsaae comparing the bronze implements in China and 

 Japan with those of Mexico and Peru, and declaring emphatically his 

 opinion that bronze was a modern novelty introduced into America. 

 While these items of Asiatic culture in America are so localized as to 

 agree best with the hypothesis of communication far south across the 



