THE HUMAN SPECIES. 2G5 



aboriginal, whose peaceful phlegmatic habits readily yielded to 

 the turbulent activity of male adventurers, and accounts for the 

 various other phenomena which attend the question under con- 

 sideration. 



In the successive struggles of nations, which must have 

 ensued, for hunting grounds or for dominion, the more advanced 

 nave evidently been obliged to yield to those from the north. 

 Whether both originally came from the same quarter, or one 

 had previously arrived by a marine route, the result was the 

 same. The proofs are seen in the ruins of vast castral cities, 

 and human tumuli, still extant in the United States ; in the 

 Maen Stones and Cromlehs of the more eastern regions;* in 

 the pyramids and temples possessed by the successive nations 

 of Mexico ; and, if the singularly squared cone in the middle 

 of a lake of Northern California be wholly or in part the work 

 of Man, it may be a memorial of departure, or a mark of direc- 

 tion for other tribes, perhaps similar to the semi-artificial pile 

 of Chehel Suton — that antique landmark of migration, and 

 directing guide of caravans, situated on the edge of the western 

 Gobi desert, almost midway between Pekin and Constantinople, 

 or Serica and Byzantium. At all events, it would then point 

 out the station which the builders of similar edifices in America 

 once occupied in their earliest day, and confirm the conjecture 

 that the Wapisians of Guiana, at least, are of those tribes, 

 which, at a period long anterior to the march of the Ulmecks 

 and Toltecs, nations of a kindred race, had passed over the pla- 

 teau of Anahuac. Beside the monosyllabic Othomi language, 

 there is a similar mode of connecting sounds into long strung 

 words, pervading the American, Astec and Maya, approach- 

 ing Finnic and Tahtar dialects ; the syllables Ac or Ak, Uk 

 and Kith, often recur in the northern Indian tongues ; and Tla 

 and Tie in the Mexican ; sounds which are again found in the 

 speech of the Arctic nations of both continents. In addition to 



* At North Salem, New York ; at Winipignan river, on tho O^io. &c. 



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