122 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA 
built dwellings and temples, which yet endure as testimony of their progress, 
Although their minds were doubtless uncultivated in tho:e higher branches 
of knowledge and refinement which ensures perpetuity to national life, they 
seem to have led the world in the early use of language, and the adoption of 
picture-writing to record and communicate ideas. 
The sun, which was long the national emblem of Central American nations, 
is the absolute basis of mythology. It seems probable that Yucatan once ex- 
tended over the present bed of the Gulf of Mexico, including the West Indian 
Islands. The Caribs may be a degenerate remnant of some aboriginal race. 
The ancestors of our North American Indians were very uncultivated in their 
physical, mental and social condition. 
Long before Egypt, the progenitor of Greece and Europe, was settled, the 
inhabitants of Yucatan appear by their monuments to have been well ad- 
vanced in general intellectual attainments, and to have led all known nations 
in art and science. Why may not a branch of this people have emigrated 
to China and Egypt, and there have become a large and advanced nation ? 
Many things unite to prove that China, at the opening of her treaty ports 
to European trade, was unmistakably retrograding in the physical as well as 
social organization of her people. Her highest prosperity is thought to have 
been reached about the reign of Genghis khan. 
Agassiz tells us that, geologically considered, America is the oldest con- 
tinent. If so, why should we not look to it, as the spot where the human 
race first gained ascendancy, and acquired its primeval home? If its primi- 
tive races have died out, and stone pyramids crumbled beneath the dust, is it 
not a strong argument in favor of her antiquity? In Asia, traces yet remain 
of original races, whose earlier civilization in America, under different physi- 
cal conditions, has had time to culminate, dissolve, and fade from sight. 
Wher, in the early development of America, progress was sufficient to facili- 
tate emigration, why may she not have furnished population to Asia? In 
submitting this question, with evidence calculated to warrant further study, 
and outlining various channels for investigation, we aim to attract for it that 
scientific attention which, as an ethnological problem, it fairly deserves, hop- 
ing some satisfactory answer may be attempted, before facilities for imterroga- 
tion yet available among American aborigines, shall have passed ax ay forever. 
This imperfect collection of facts is laid before the Academy in its present 
condition, not in any way to ask for present endorsement, but to awaken 
new sources of inquiry among thoughtful ethnologists, which may ultimately 
lead to a discovery of the truth. A large mass of additional facts bearing 
upon this subject require more labor than I have yet found time to bestow, 
and would also unreasonably swell this already lengthy paper, which is 
offered as a simple inquiry, suggested to careful and technical scientists, 
who, by comparing physical, embryolegical, and linguistic characteristics, 
pertinent histories, and traditions, may in future establish or disprove the 
possibilities here shadowed forth. 
