256 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



daring, revengeful, restless, cruel, but capable of lofty 

 feelings, full of hospitality, of the love of truth, and of 

 vast earnestness of purpose when once their attention 

 is roused. Ruins still extant in nearly every region of 

 the continent, and still more, history, as written by their 

 enemies, attest that they could work out systems of self- 

 development, creating civilizations which were fast ad- 

 vancing to a more reasoned maturity, notwithstanding 

 that the foundations were often stricken down by suc- 

 cessive hordes of new invaders, till the whole was finally 

 crushed by European zeal and cupidity. For, notwith- 

 standing our view of a foreign element having worked 

 in the development of the indigenous social institutions, 

 it must be recollected, that a few strangers cannot sway 

 a distinct people, unprepared to receive their sugges- 

 tions ; they must be homogeneous, the result of time 

 and of national engraftings, before they can take root. 

 Now, the Mexican civilization was a reconstruction of 

 one or more preceding it ; and the Ulmec and Toltec, 

 so much older, were most likely not the first that per- 

 vaded the warmer regions of Western America ; there- 

 fore the American mind, resulting, as we claim it to 

 be, from two typical stocks of Man, is only inferior in 

 capacity, so far as the existing races are more or less re- 

 moved from the means of attainment of social improve- 

 ment ; and the cold philosophy of modern science, which 

 inflicts the accusation, is not totally destitute of cognate 

 participation, in producing the conditions of existence 

 it stigmatizes. Luckily, a host of writers, and among 

 them lately, Prescot, have fairly summed up what the 



