92 CUP-SHAPED AND OTHER LAPIDAPvIAN SCULPTUEES. 



probable application — opinions which I am ready to abandon, as soon as 

 more satisfactory explanations are brought forward. Eegarding the larger 

 North American cnpped stones, more especially that belonging to the Cin- 

 cinnati Society of Natural History, I am unable for the present to oflPer the 

 slightest elucidation. 



The qiiestion naturally arises, whether the practice of excavating cups 

 in rocks was introduced in America by immigrants from abroad, or whether 

 it sjorang np spontaneously in the New World. Being a believer in the 

 Darwinian doctrine of evolution, I consider man as a foreign element in 

 America. My reasons for that belief need not be given in this place : they 

 are known to all who follow in the wake of the great English naturalist. 

 I am fiirther of opinion that the present American continent received its 

 population at a very remote period, when, pei'haps, the distribution of land 

 and sea was different from what it is now. The earliest immigrants may 

 have been so low in the scale of human development that they yet lacked 

 the faculty of expressing themselves in articulate language.* However, it 

 can hardly be supposed that the peopling of America took place at a cer- 

 tain time and was discontinued afterward : on the contrary, there are reasons 

 which render a continued connection with distant parts, more especially 

 with Asia, highly probable. The innate tendency which leads man inde- 

 pendently in different parts of the world to the same or similar inventions 

 and conceptions, provided that there is a sufficient similarity in the external 

 conditions of existence, will account for many customs and practices of the 

 aboriginal American ; but it fails to explain, for instance, the highly arti- 

 ficial and complicated system of reckoning time, which was in vogue among 

 the Toltecs, Mexicans and Yucatecs, and was almost identical with the 

 system still applied in Thibet and Tartary. It hardly can be imagined that 

 a method so intricate and peculiar in its principle could have originated in 

 different parts of the world, and hence one is almost driven to believe in 

 later connections between the inhabitants of Asia and America.t 



* In what other way can we account for the totally diverse characteristics of the numerous lin 

 gulstic families of America? 



t Those desirous of more precise information on the subject will find it in Humboldt's " Vues dea 

 Cordilleres " (Paris, 1810, ji. 125-194), or in the translation of that work, known as "Humboldt's Re- 

 searches" (London, 1814, Vol. I, p. 276-409), and in Tyler's" Anahuac" (London, 1831, p. 241, etc.). 



