144 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



forest which then extended from the foot of the volcano of Pichincha 

 to the spot in question. The monks, whom I often visited during my 

 stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them the inscription on the 

 earthen vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic refer- 

 ence to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the old German 

 dialect, and was " Whoso drinks from me let him not forget his 

 God." I too felt with the monks that this old German drinking 

 vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been pre- 

 served everywhere in the New Continent the names, not of those 

 who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who 

 first intrusted to it these its fruits, so early associated with the 

 civilization of mankind in the Old Continent ! In respect generally 

 to the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affini- 

 ties of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that "such 

 indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, 

 and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care 

 of cattle : herdsmen, when dispersed, had still much in common, 

 whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new 

 words. But the fact that, in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans 

 and Greeks appear nearly on a par with the Germans and Sclavonians, 

 argues in favor of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the 

 two latter. .Yet the Indian 'Java' (Frumentum hordeum), com- 

 pared with the Lithuanian 'jawai/ and the Finnish 'jywa/ offers, a 

 singular exception." (Jae. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, 

 th. i. s,. 69.) 



(*) p. 34. "Keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions." 

 Throughout Mexico and Peru the traces of a great degree of civil- 

 ization are confined to the elevated plateaux. We have seen on the 

 Andes the ruins of palaces and baths at heights between 1600 and 

 1800 toises (10,230 and 11,510 English feet). It can only have 

 -been men of a northern race, who, migrating from the north towards 

 the south, could find delight in such a climate. 



() p. 34. "The history of the peopling of Japan " 

 The probability of the western nations of the New Continent having 

 had communication with the east of Asia long before the arrival of 



