INDIAN HOME LIFE. 109 
the time of Carib supremacy in the Lesser Antilles, 
were residents of the country north of Florida, and 
that a different tribe, the Yemassees, inhabited the 
peninsula. 
Very naturally arises the question, whence came 
this people? This must remain unanswered until 
our savanis have determined the origin of the entire 
race of which these Indians are but a fragmentary 
portion. They may trace them to Jew or Tartar, to 
Malay or Pheenician, for their remote origin; but 
to the ethnologist who believes in an original Amer- 
ican civilization, that there was for ages an emigra- 
tion from South America northward, a little light may 
be afforded by tracing the confines of the Carib. 
Considering the Esquimaux and the North Amer- 
ican Indians to be an “immigrant element” from Asia, 
we must look to the South for the origin of those other 
tribes more advanced than they in civilization. The 
Mound-builders of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, 
and the Cliff-dwellers of Colorado and Arizona, may 
be traced to Mexico as the country from which they 
sprung. The Aztecs, in the height of their power 
when discovered by the Spaniards, pointed to South 
America as the land from which they had invaded 
Mexico. Those learned men are not few who trace 
a connection from these peoples to that wonderful 
race that built the aqueducts of Peru and the roads 
of the Incas; and who maintain further that Amer- 
ican civilization had its beginning in the elevated val- 
leys of Peru. 
These Caribs have no affinity with the people who 
built such wonderful cities and wrought such works 
of art as now lie scattered throughout the vast for- 
