Hemisphere has been practically isolated from the Old World and all its generations for unnumbered centuries. The traditions of the Aztecs told of an ancient era when Quetzalcoatl, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals, in agriculture, and the arts of government, dwelt in their midst. Fancy pictured in brightest colours that golden age of Anahuac, thus associated with the mythic traditions of some wise benefactor and civilizer of the Aztec nation. But amid all the glowing fancies with which tradition delighted to clothe the transmitted memories of the age of Quetzalcoatl, a curious definiteness pertains to the physical characteristics of this ancient benefactor of the race. He was said to have been tall of stature, with a fair complexion, long dark hair, and a flowing beard. This remarkable tradition of a wise teacher, superior to all the race among whom he dwelt, and marked by characteristics so unlike the native physiognomy, was accompanied with the belief that, after completing his mission among the Aztecs, he embarked on the Atlantic Ocean for the mysterious shores of Tlapallan, with the promise to return. How far the rumours of Spanish invasion preceded the actual landing of Cortes, and helped to give shape to more ancient traditions, it must be difficult to determine. Nearly thirty years elapsed between the first insular discoveries of Columbus and the landing of Cortes on the Mexican shores; and many a tale of the strange visitors who had come from out the ocean's eastern horizon, armed with the thunder and the lightning, and with a skill in metallurgy such as the divine teacher of the art could alone be supposed to possess, may have shaped itself into the vague tradition of the good Quetzalcoatl, as it passed from one to another eager listener, ere it reached the Mexican plateau. But the tradition seems like the embodiment of the faint

memories of an older intercourse with the race of another hemisphere, when Egyptian or Phoenician, Greek, Iberian, or Northman, may have dwelt among the gentle elder race of the plateau, before the era of Aztec conquest, and taught them those arts wherein lie the essential germs of civilisation. If so, however, the race remained physically unaffected by the temporary presence of its foreign teachers, and continued to develop all the special characteristics of the American type of man, until Columbus, Cabot, Verrazzano, and Cartier, Cortes, Pizarro, De Leon, Raleigh, and other discoverers and explorers, prepared the way for the great ethnological experiment of the last three centuries, of transferring the populations of one climate and hemisphere to other and totally diverse conditions of existence on the New Continent.

But now we witness on the American continent the two essentially distinct forms of migration, by means of which the capacity of the indigenous man of one quarter of the globe to be acclimatized and permanently installed as the occupant of another, is to be fully tested. First we have the abrupt transport of the Spaniard to the American archipelago, to the tierra caliente of the Gulf coast, and the tierra fria of the plateau; the equally abrupt transference of the Englishman to the warm latitudes of Virginia and the bleak New England coast; and the attempt of the colonists of Henry IV. and Louis XIII. to found la Nouvelle France between Tadousac and Quebec, where winter reigns through half the year, and the thermometer ranges frequently from 30° to 40° below zero. Again, we have the compulsory migration of a population derived from the interior and the Atlantic coasts of the African continent, to the islands and those southern states of America, where experience indicates that the industrial occupation of

the soil is incompatible with the healthful development of the races of northern Europe. But on the same continent we also witness another and totally distinct process of migration, analogous to that by which the ancient earth must first have been peopled, whether from one or many centres of human origin. Unnumbered ages may have elapsed after the creation of man before, on the theory of his passage from Asia to America, the first progenitors of those whom we call its aborigines acquired a footing on the soil of the New World. Its ancient forests and prairies, its lakes, river valleys, and mountain chains, lay all before them, to be subdued, triumphed over, and, with their wild fauna, to be made subservient to the wants and the will of man. From one or many points the ever-widening circle of migration enlarged itself, until, throughout the broad territories of the Western Hemisphere, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, every region had passed to its first rightful claimants. Thus secured in full possession of the soil, the American Mongol made of it what he willed through all the centuries of his race's destiny, till that memorable year when, according to the traditions of the Mexican plateau, the race of Quetzalcoatl came to fulfil the doom of Montezuma's line, and to accomplish the prophecies of the Aztec seers. Then followed the second migration to the New World, which is still in progress, and only differs from the primary migration in this, that the forest and the prairie are already in occupation; and, with their wild fauna, the scarcely less wild aborigines have to be subdued, supplanted, or embraced within the conquests of nature to the uses of civilized man. Once more, from many single points, as from the Pilgrim Rock of Plymouth Bay in 1620, the new population has diffused itself continuously in ever-widening circles. It has been estimated that, under the combined

influences of natural increase and constant augmentation by immigration, the outer circle of the great western clearings encroaches on the unreclaimed West at the rate of about nine miles annually throughout the whole extent of its vast border. We know that the New Englander, abruptly transplanted to South Carolina or Alabama, is as incapable of withstanding the climatic change as the Old Englander. But if we suppose the first settlers of New England to have been left to themselves, with their indomitable industry and earnest enterprise, to build up a well-consolidated community, to frame laws for the government of the growing society, and to send out hardy young pioneers to win for themselves the needful widening area, we can see how, in the lapse of centuries, younger generations would at length reach the Gulf of Florida and the Rocky Mountains, without any one of them having travelled beyond the circumference of its previously acclimated region; unless indeed we believe, with the extreme sticklers for the well-defined habitats of indigenous races of men, that such an intrusive exotic race, however much it may seem for a time as though it were begetting native inheritors of the territorial acquisition, is in reality only

"Like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to nought."1

This is the actual question which has to be solved by means of the dual migration of the fair and the dark races of the ancient world, who have become the supplanters of the indigenous tribes of America. And by means of such migration many questions besides this have already been at least provisionally answered. Are subdivisions of the human family indigenous in certain

1 Henry VI. Part I. Act i. Scene ii.

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