60 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



favour of former relations between peoples separated from each other by the broad 

 waters of the Pacific. The communications that may have taken place at various 

 epochs, and even the resemblances noticed between the Mexicans and Chinese, 

 can in no way justify the assumption of the common origin of the two races, or 

 even of their cultures. As far as histor}^ and tradition go back, the Mexican 

 lands have always been inhabited ; whether aborigines or not, these populations 

 would have been spoken of by the Greeks as " autochthones," or indigenous. 



As in other places, such as the neighbourhood of Puy, in the south of France, 

 geologists have also discovered the fossil remains of a quaternary man on the 

 Anahuac plateau, near the city of Mexico. These interesting remains, dating 

 from an epoch long anterior to Aztec civilisation, were brought to light in 1884 

 at the foot, of the Penon de los Banos in the saline plains formerly flooded by the 

 waters of Lake Texcoco to the east of the capital. The bones were found 

 in the vegetable humus under a layer of lava in association with some kitchen 

 refuse. 



The osteological characters of this fossil Mexican liian are the same as those of 

 the pure indigenous race of Anahuac, in which the canine teeth scarcely differ 

 from the incisors. The man of Penon was contemporaneous with the elephant, 

 deer and horse which inhabited the same region at a time when the level of the 

 waters in the Texcoco lagoon was 10 feet higher than at present, and when vol- 

 canic eruptions anterior to history had not yet taken place. 



Elsewhere, flints or cherts, evidently worked by the hand of man, have been 

 found amongst deposits also containing the teeth and other remains of the Ameri- 

 can elephant {eleplim Colomhi). These primitive races must consequently have 

 flourished many thousand years before the present time. 



At a time when Rome was hastening to its fall, and the barbaric peoples of 

 North Europe were overrunning the empire, the Anahuac tableland in Central 

 America was .already the seat of an advanced civilisation. Doubtless, it is far 

 from easy to classify peoples as barbarous or civilised according to their various 

 degrees of culture ; but the latter term, which has so often a purely conventional 

 meaning, may justly be applied to the Aztecs, or Mexicans, as well as to the 

 Mayas of Yucatan, the Chibchas [Muiscas), Quichuas, and Aymaras of South 

 America. It might even be extended to the Pueblo Indians, and perhaps to other 

 native communities in North America. 



Amongst the less advanced nations, whom they, nevertheless, resembled in 

 their political and social evolution, the Mexicans were distinguished by their 

 national cohesion, by their highly developed economic system, their arts and 

 sciences, as well as the knowledge of numerous technical processes enabling them 

 to facilitate labour. Like the early civilisations of the Old World, such as 

 those of Egypt, Chaldgea, India, and China, that of Mexico took its rise at some 

 distance from the ocean on the uplands encircled by lofty border ranges or steep 

 escarpments. It had neither a Nile nor a Euphrates, by which the riverain 

 populations could be merged in a compact nation ; but it had its lakes, far more 

 extensive than at present, whose shifting levels, periodical floods and subsidences 



