INHABITANTS OP MEXICO. 59 



Inhabitants of Mexico. 



The hypotheses that have been advanced regarding the origin of the various 

 populations found by the Spaniards in Mexico at the time of the conquest are 

 almost as numerous as the works written on the ethnology of this region. 

 Naturally, the early writers, being obliged to harmonise their fancies with the 

 Biblical texts, had to trace the Mexicans back to one of Noah's sons, arriving either 

 by sea with the waters of the Deluge or by land after the subsidence of the flood. 



Even during the present century certain authors have endeavoured to show 

 that these natives are descended from the Jews " dispersed over the earth " after 

 the Babylonian captivity. According to them, the kinshij) is attested by the 

 physical appearance, the national character, the religious manners, customs, myths, 

 traditions, even the very language of the Mexican nation. Other writers sought 

 in classical antiquity, amongst the Egj^ptians, Phœnicians, or Carthaginians, for 

 some indications of a former immigration into the New AVorld, and Plato's 

 Atlantis could not be overlooked in the conjectural history of the old Mexican 

 races. " The Atonatiuh, that is to say, the Atlantides," says Alfredo Chavero, 

 "are the mother people of the civilised nations of Europe and America; the 

 Spaniards and the Toltecs alike descend from them." Brasseur de Bourbourg even 

 fancied he had made out from the Nahuatl manuscript known as the Codex ChUnal- 

 popoca that an " eruption of volcanoes stretching over the whole extent of the 

 American continent, which was at that time double its present size, blew up the 

 globe, and between two risings of the morning star engulfed the richest regions of 

 the earth." Fortunately, the Atlantides of the present Mexico escaped the 

 disaster, and survived to record it on those monuments of American literature 

 and architecture which no savant had hitherto been able to interpret. 



But putting aside these vagaries, the most accepted hypothesis, expounded under 

 various forms by Guignes, Humboldt, Prescott, Quatrefages, and Haniy, regards 

 the Mexicans as immigrants from Asia, arriving either by Bering Strait or the 

 Aleutian Islands, or else directly across the ocean, or from group to group of the 

 Polynesian Islands. The relative proximity of the two continents of Asia and 

 North America, and the undoubted fact that Japanese junks had actually been 

 cast ashore on the Californian seaboard during the historic period, could not fail 

 to suggest such views, and commend them to the serious consideration of many 

 superficial enquirers. There is, however, no authentic proof that the mysterious 

 region where grows the fusa Jig, and which was supposed to have been discovered 

 by a Chinese expedition at the beginning of the seventh century, is really Mexico 

 or Central America ; nor does the description of the country given by the old 

 Chinese writer agree very well with that of the Anahuac plateau, still less with 

 the habits and customs of the natives as described by the Spanish conquerors. 



The religion of the Aztecs differs also too profoundly from Buddhism or any 

 other east Asiatic s^^stem to recognise in it the teachings of any Chinese mission- 

 aries. On the other hand the fancied coincidences of symbolical signs and figures 

 are far too vague to establish anything more than the faintest presumption in 



