Yet the same conditions made them the ruggedest, bravest, and most independent of races, and utterly unassimilable. Thus, as found by the Europeans, while because of their poverty provoking no programme of systematic conquest and dispossession, they were foredoomed to inevitable progressive dislodgement and ultimate extermination or segregation. The cultivated and numerous races of Mexico and Peru, on the other hand, exciting the cupidity of the Spaniards by their wealth, were reduced to subjection at a blow. Put though ruthlessly slaughtered by the most bloody and cruel conquerors known to the criminal annals of history, these more refined people of the south had reserved for them a less melancholy destiny than that of the untutored children of the wilderness. Their survivors readily gave themselves to the processes of absorption, and their descendants to-day are coheirs, in JSTD ARROW: all degrees of consanguinity, with the progeny of the despoil er. The origin of the native races of America is. in the present state of knowledge, a problem of peculiar difficulty. Nothing is contributed toward its solution by any written records now known to exist. None of the aboriginal inhabitants of either of the Americas left any written annals. The opinion is held by some scholars, who favor the the-

HISTORY

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s of orv of Asiatic origin, that when the as yet unpublished treasure definite world the before spread be to come e literatur Chinese ancient lioht niav be cast upon the subject. There is a strong- probability that on the civilization of the Aztecs was either of direct Mongolian derivati . ntations transpla an .Mongoli early or partiallv a development from This view is sustained, first, by certain superficial resemblances, and, of second by various details in old Chinese manuscripts suggesti.veThe former intercourse with the shores of Mexico and South America as a wanbelief that man's initial appearance on this hemisphereof was the very near derer from Asia finds plausible support in the fact beapproach of the American land mass to Asia at the north, the two a continuous chain of steppingin- separated bv a narrow strait, whilecoast Accepting not far below. stone islands reaches from coast to the orders, lower the from n evolutio man's of theory an the Darwini idea of his indigenous growth in America seems to be precluded; for no traces have been found of the existence at any time of his proximate ancestors-- the higher species of apes, from which alone he could have come, having no representatives here in the remains of bygone times.