674 COSMOS. 



stance of its appearing before us amid the records of history, 

 and free from the disturbing reality of the present. But here 

 too, as in all earthly things, the brilliancy of greatness is 

 dimmed by the association of emotions of profound sorrow. 

 The advance of cosmical knowledge was bought at the price 

 of the violence and revolting horrors which conquerors the 

 so-called civilisers of the earth spread around them. But it 

 were irrational and rashly bold to decide dogmatically on the 

 balance of blessings and evils in the interrupted history of 

 the development of mankind. It becomes not man to pro- 

 nounce judgment on the great events of the world's history, 

 which slowly developed in the womb of time belong but 

 partially to the age in which we place them. 



The first discovery of the central and southern portions of 

 the United States of America by the Northmen coincides very 

 nearly with the mysterious appearance of Manco Capac in the 

 elevated plateaux of Peru, and is almost two hundred years 

 prior to the arrival of the Azteks in the valley of Mexico. 

 The foundation of the principal city (Tenochtitlan) occurred 

 fully three hundred and twenty -five years later. If these 

 Scandinavian colonisations had been attended by permanent 

 results, if they had been maintained and protected by a 

 powerful mother- country, the advancing Germanic races 

 would still have found many unsettled hordes of hunters in 

 those regions where the Spanish conquerors met with only 

 peacefully settled agriculturists.^ 



* The American race, which was the same from 65 north latitude to 

 55 south latitude, passed directly from the life of hunters to that of 

 cultivators of the soil, without undergoing the intermediate gradation, 

 of a pastoral life. This circumstance is so much the more remarkable, 

 because the bison, which is met with in enormous herds is susceptible of 

 domestication, and yields an abundant supply of milk. Little attention has 

 been paid to an account given in Gornara (Hist. gen. de las Indias, cap. 

 214); according to which it would appear that in the sixteenth century- 

 there was a race of men living in the north-west of Mexico, in about 40 

 north latitude, whose greatest riches consisted in herds of tamed bisons 

 (bueyes con una giba). From these animals the natives obtained materials 

 for clothing, food, and drink, which was probably the blood, (Prescott, 

 Conquest of Mexico, vol. iii. p. 416,) for the dislike to milk, or at least its 

 non-employment appears, before the arrival of Europeans, to have been 

 common to all the natives of the new continent, as well as to the inha- 

 bitants of China and Cochin-China. There were certainly, from the 

 earliest times., herds of domesticated llamas in the mountainous parts of 



