REVIEWS — NOTES ON CENTRAL AMEBICA. 375 



races of man. In obedience to the ordinances of Heaven, it has rescued half 

 a continent from savage beasts and still more savage men, whose period of exis- 

 tence has terminated, and who must give place to higher organizations and a supe- 

 rior life. Short sighted philanthrophy may lament, and sympathy drop a tear as it 

 looks forward to the total disappearance of the lower forms of humai.ity, but the 

 laws of Nature are irreversible. Deus vult — it is the will of God !" 



Beus vult ! — The reader will not fail to call to remembrance when 

 this cri de guerre was first adopted. Deus vult ! shouted the crusa- 

 ders of Western Europe when the first fanatical host prepared to set 

 out for the purpose of exterminating the infidel races of the East, 

 and with like pious consistency the enslaver of the African Negro 

 and the exterminator of the American Indian in our own day, com- 

 placently pursue their own selfish ends as the will of God! Apart, 

 however, from subjects which it is difficult for the American diplo. 

 matist and politician to view with an impartial eye, the ethnological 

 speculations of our author are well worthy of attention, and have at- 

 tracted notice in more than one previous work from Ins pen. In re- 

 lation to the aboriginal population of San Salvador, he remarks : 



"The inquirer into the history and relations of the aborigines of America is often 

 surprised to find enigmatical fragments of the great primitive families of the conti- 

 nent widely separated from their parent stocks, and intruded among nations differing 

 fiom them in manners, language, government, and religion. These erra^'c fragments 

 — to adopt a geological term — in some instances present the clearest and most in- 

 dubitable evidences of their origin ana relationship, in an almost unchanged lan- 

 guage, and in a civil and social organization, manners, and customs, little, if at all, 

 modified from those of their distant progenitors. The inference from this would 

 naturally be that their separation had been comparatively recent ; yet these iden- 

 tities have been found to exist in cases where tradition fails to assign a cause or 

 period for the disruption, or even to indicate the manner in which it took place. 



At the period of the discovery of America, a colony or fragment of that primi- 

 tive stock, which, under the name of Quiches, Kichiquels, Tzendal es, Mayas, etc., 

 occupied nearly the whole of what is now Guatemala, Chiapa, and Yucatan, was 

 found established on the River Panuco. They bore the name of Huastecas, and 

 from them had proceeded these beneficent men who carried the arts of civilization 

 and the elements of a mild religion into those regions, where the Acolhuas and Az- 

 tecas, or Nahuales, afterwards built up the so-called Mexican empire. It was one 

 of their leaders bearing the hereditary name Quetzalcoatl in the Nahual dialect, 

 and Cuculcan in the Tzendal, who taught the higher arts to the inhabitants of 

 Cholula, and who afterwards returned to the primitive seats of his fathers in the 

 valley of the Usumasinta by way of the isthmus of Coatzacoalcos. The period of 

 this migration to the Panuco dates back beyond the foundation of the principalities 

 of Anahuac, and is anterior to the Tezcucan and Aztec dynasties. 



In Central America, on the other hand, two considerable fragments of the true 

 Nahual or Aztec stock were found intruded among thfc native or original families of 

 that portion of the continent. One of these, as I have shown in my work on Nica. 

 ragua, occupied the principal islands in the Lake of Nicaragua, the narrow isthmus 

 which intervenes between that lake and the Pacific, and probably a portion of the 



