165 Dr Morton on the Distinctive Characteristics of the 
duces the Mongols in large ships, with all the appliances of 
war, not even excepting ejyephants ; and in order that the 
Tartar general may correspond to Manco Capac, he is made 
to enter Peru by the Lake Titicaca, upwards of an hundred 
miles from the sea. Such statements may seem too absurd 
for sober discussion ; but they are not more so than various 
other subterfuges which have been resorted to in explana- 
tion of the precise manner in which the New World has 
been peopled from the Old. 
But there is not a shadow of evidence that the Mongols 
ever reached America in ships excepting by mere accident ; 
and, therefore, their number must have always been too 
small, and too badly provided, to have dreamt of conquest 
in a country which has had a population of millions from im- 
memorial time. 
There is a third view of this question which remains to be 
noticed ; for, allowing that the Esquimaux and the cognate 
Polar nations are not the progenitors of the American race ; 
and admitting also that the Mongols of Central Asia could 
never have arrived in any requisite number by a direct 
voyage from one continent to the other, yet it is supposed 
by many learned men that these Mongols could have reached 
America by slow journeys from their own distant country, 
and that their hieroglyphic charts delineate many of the in- 
cidents of this protracted migration ; but there is no positive 
evidence in regard to direction and localities, although these, 
by a very general consent, are placed in the north and north- 
west. Cabrera, on the contrary, after the most patient re- 
search, aided by unusual facilities for investigation, traces 
the primal seat of the civilized nations of America to South- 
ern Mexico, where the ruined cities of Copan, Uxmal, and 
Palenque, point to an epoch seemingly much more remote 
than any antiquities contained in or near the present metro- 
polis of that country. 
If we conventionally adopt the more prevalent opinion, and 
trace the Aztecs back to California or the Strait, we have, 
after all, but a vague tradition of a handful of persons who, 
for all we know to the contrary, may have been as indigenous 
ee ee ey ee eee 
= + St aoe 
