14 JOHN EEADE ON 



place, it would be necessary to have thoroughly acctirate statistics regarding the abori- 

 gines at the time of the conquest, their number, material resources, moral and intellectual 

 condition. In the second place, we should require statistics equally trustworthy respect- 

 ing the first conquistadores and those who succeeded them, and there, too, (owing to the 

 absence of any regular census system) we should be left largely in doubt. Finally, we 

 should have to inquire how far any comparison of the mixed American States with the 

 motherlands, to which they owed their European blood, was in favour of the former. It is 

 true that Central and South Americans of mixed blood, some of them more Indian than 

 European, have attained distinction in politics, in art and in literature. The list of such 

 names is better known in Neo-Latin Europe than it is in North America, and in that roll 

 of honour, the aborigines of this continent have certainly a considerable share. Obvious 

 reasons, however, preclude such instances from being used to illustrate the course of 

 purely American development, which virtually came to an end on the arrival of the con- 

 querors or colonists. 



The problem presented to the student of human progress by the nations and tribes 

 that occupied America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a most perplexing one. 

 In Central America, Mexico and Peru, there existed types of civilisation which, whatever 

 parallel they might have in the semi-barbarous epapires of the ancient world, admit of no 

 comparison with the nomad tribes of hunters and warriors which peopled the rest of the 

 continent. They lack, unfortunately, that sine qua non of genuine intellectual life, the 

 art of writing, and what of their past their pictographs or quipus had saved from oblivion 

 was sacrificed by the ignorant jealousy of the Spaniards, whenever it fell into their hands. 

 A recent visitor to Mexico professes indignation at Zumarraga's destruction of pic- 

 ture-writings,' which he qualifies, with humorous exaggeration, as ''surely the unpardon- 

 able sin, and one that looks black cA^en by the side of human sacrifice." "When, however, 

 the comparatively small success which has attended the efforts of scholars to interpret 

 such documents as have been preserved, is taken into consideration, one may be permitted 

 to doubt whether, after all, the loss sustained was so grievous as it is generally represented 

 to be. Nearly all that is most trustworthy and valuable in works relating to prehistoric 

 America is the result of independent and laborious research into the ethnology, languages 

 and mythologies of the aborigines. Many statements of the early historians, especially of 

 such interested authors as Ixtlilxochitl and Grarcilaso de la Vega, which were long received 

 without question by translators and compilers, have failed to stand the test of rigid cross- 

 examination. If, in this process of sifting, the story loses some of the flavour of romance, 

 the gain in real knowledge is more than sufficient compensation. 



As to the object with which I am now concerned, there is happily, a consensus of both 

 ancient and modern authorities on one important point, the universal prevalence of dance 

 and song among the American Indians. From Cape Horn to Point Barrow, there is no 

 tribe, with which European inquirers have come in contact, that has not attained some 



' Pictorial records were not confined to the partially civilised nations of Mexico and Central America. 

 Copway, an Ojibway, compiled a " Traditional History " of his people from a collection of their symbolic writings. 

 Dr. Brinton wrote " Tlie Lenape and tlieir Legends " from tlie " Walani Olani," or Picture Record, discovered by 

 Raffiuesque. The Sioux warrior Sitting Bull, Joseph the Nez Percé chief, and Running Antelope tlie Uncpapa 

 leader, have all composed pictograph autobiographies. 



