Aboriginal Races of America [pp. 59-92]

Aboriginal Races of America.
2. Maize, which was the great and almost sole foundation
of American agriculture, is exclusively of American origin,
and was not known to the other hemisphere, until after the
discovery of America, at the end of the fifteenth century.*
The kind o.f beans, called by the Spaniards Frijoles, which
is still cultivated by the Indians in Mexico and Central
America, is indigenous to America, and unknown in the other
hemisphere. If these facts be conceded, as they have here tofore been, it will not be questioned that the agriculture of
America was of domestic origin, as well as their semi-civili zation. These facts alone must assert for the American
races a primitive origin and high antiquity.
A glance at their astronomical knowledge, their arithme tic, division of time, names of days, etc., will show that their
whole system was peculiar; and, if not wholly original,
must antedate all historical times of the old world, as it has
no parallel on record. The Israelites, the Chaldeans, the
Chinese, the Egyptians, and other nations of the Eastern
Hemisphere, had divisions of time and astronomical know ledge, more than 2000 years B. C., and yet our Indians had
no trace of these s)ystems.
"Almost all the nations of the world appear, in their first attempts to
compute time, to have resorted to lunar months, which they afterwards
adjusted in various ways, in order to make them correspond with the
solar year. In America, the Peruvians, the Chilians and the Muyscas,
proceeded in the same way, but not so with the Mexicans. And it is a
remarkable fact, that, the short period of seven days, our week, so universal in Europe and in Asia, was unknown to all the Indians either of
North or South America." t
"All the nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and probably of Central America, which were within the pale of civilization, had two distinct modes
of computing time. The first, and vulgar mode, was a period of twenty
days, which has certainly no connection with any celestial phenomenon,
and which was clearly derived from their system of numeration, or
arithmetic, which was peculiar to them.
*Dr. Bachman, of Charleston, South-Carolina, in his book on the Unity of the
Races, has raised a question as to the American origin of maize, but Humboldt,
Parmentier, Linnaus. and almost all authority, is against him.
tGallatin, Notes, Trans. Am. E. 9, p. 57.
0
1853.]
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