14 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



have been by no means comprehended. Every day the hardy and ventur- 

 some prospectors of New Mexico, who, like the Spaniards of the sixteenth 

 century, are urged on by an ardent quest of precious metals, discover new 

 evidences of the existence, in prehistoric times, of a race of men, who in 

 architecture, agriculture and the working of gold and silver, possessed a de- 

 gree of knowledge and skill hardly surpassed in any age. The discoveries 

 of these explorers also go far to prove that the land which is now so unpro- 

 ductive was once sufficiently arable and prolific of vegetation to sustain a 

 dense population, and that the various reasons which are proposed by the 

 writers of the present day to account for the abandonment of the country by 

 these people, such as superstitious fear, the persecutions of hostile tribes, etc., 

 are futile and unacceptable. It seems unquestionable that some vast change 

 took place in the geological and physical condition of the country, causing 

 its fountains to dry up, and changing its fertile valleys into arid wastes, thus 

 literally starving the people out, and forcing them to seek new homes. This 

 idea brings to the front the theory of the continent of Atlantis, with more 

 plausibility than almost any other — a theory which, if established, will en- 

 able us to account for the migration of ancient peoples from one continent to 

 the other, without taxing our credulity with the extremely doubtful one of 

 the Behring's straits route. But since this route is buried in the mists of ages, 

 possibly as far back as the Miocene period, when man did not exist, so far as 

 we have been able to discover, we need not discuss it ; especially when some 

 of the most learned ethnologists, such as Prof. Retzius and Dr. Daniel Wil- 

 son, assert and apparently prove that the brachycephalic race can be traced 

 through the Kurile islands and on the continent, from the latitude of Behr- 

 ing's straits, through Oregon, Mexico and Central America, and the whole 

 length of South America, to Patagonia; also, that the mound-builders of the 

 North were certainly of the same cranial type with the ancient Mexicans and 

 Peruvians. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, after the ablest and most ex- 

 tensive researches, declares that the pre-Aztec Mexicans or Toltecs were a 

 people identical with the mound-builders ; and Col. J. W. Foster, in his ad- 

 mirable work, the " Prehistoric Races of the United States," says that " They 

 possessed a conformation of skull which would link them to the autocthones 

 of this hemisphere — a conformation which was subsequently represented in 

 the people who developed the ancient civilization of Mexico and Central 

 America." 



Winchell, in his Preadamites, includes the Pueblo Indians of North 

 America, under the type of Asiatic Americans, and says: "These tribes 

 bear so distinctly an Asiatic stamp as to point to the Mongoloid regions of 

 the Old World as the home of their remote ancestors." 



On the other hand, there are not wanting authorities who believe and 

 assert that the civilization of New Mexico is a degraded successor of that of 

 Central America and old Mexico, and that the migration furnishing the 

 tribes that constructed the edifices of New Mexico, was from the South north- ' 



