278 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
Red Indians of the north; but it is a too general term, as it 
includes not only the highly-civilised Aztecs, Mayas, and 
Peruvians, but the much ruder Caribs of the eastern coasts 
of South America and the Antilles, who were widely removed 
from them in race and language. Squier has proposed the 
term Nahuatls for the people of Mexico and Central America, 
and if it might be strained to include the Peruvians also, and 
all the peoples descended from that ancient civilised race 
that had spread northward and southward, it would supply 
a want that I have greatly felt in studying these peoples. 
The Nahuatls—I use the term in this extended sense—are 
one of three great Indian races that occupy the greater part 
of North and South America. They had the Red Indians 
to the north of them, the savage Caribs to the south-east. 
From both these races they were profoundly different, 
though not in equal degrees. To the Red Indian they have 
scarcely any affinity, excepting such as had been brought 
about by the nomads, who came down from the north-west, 
taking the women of the Nahuatls, whom they conquered, 
for their wives, and thus bringing about some points of 
structural resemblance, such as are to be seen in a lesser 
degree in the citizens of the United States, through whose 
veins the blood of the half-breeds of the earlier settlements 
still courses. In Florida, and around the northern side of 
the Gulf of Mexico, there had probably been a greater fusion 
of the two races. But in origin the two peoples are distinct; 
the one came from north-eastern Asia, the other, I believe, 
from a tropical country joined on to the present continent, 
that was submerged at the breaking up of the glacial period. 
Was that country to the east or the west of the present 
continent? Was it Atlantis, or was it a submerged country 
in the Pacific? I am inclined to the latter opinion, and to 
believe that the inhabitants of ancient Atlantis were the 
ancestors of the warlike and adventurous Caribs. The 
Nahuatls, in their peaceful dispositions and agricultural 
pursuits, are much more nearly allied to the Polynesians, and 
their present preponderance on the western coast favours 
the idea that they had a western origin.} 
The Caribs, who were found in possession of most of the 
11 have already at page 46 alluded to the fundamental difference in 
the food of the Nahuatls and the Caribs. 
