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Show ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF FIRST INHABITANTS — 33 air and often drawn with great vigor. It is a symbol that is widely distributed over the American continent, and the being which it represents was doubtless one of the principal deities of the ancient Mexicans. Nowhere else has it been used on so magnificent a scale and with such remarkable effect as a decorative motive as upon the Aztec temple of Xochilealeo, near Cuernavaca, in Mexico. In this connection a myth of the Tlauicas, a branch of the Aztec stock inhabiting Cuernavaca valley, with reference to a mythic power represented by them in serpent form and now seen in the Milky Way, is significant. It is not to be supposed that the disappearance of this plateau Certain evipopulation was due to any catastrophic character. dences of seismic activity have been observed in this region, but there is nothing to indicate that the dispersion of the people was There is nothing to indicate any general, due to earthquake shocks. sudden exodus, but rather a gradual abandonment of the towns, as the springs and streams dried up and the sites became untenable and the farms worthless because of the failure of the supply of water. We have as yet no means of knowing to what distance the detachments that migrated from time to time from this plateau may have We find remnants of them at Hopi and in the villages wandered. of the Rio Grande valley, but these small bands do not account for the large numbers that must have at one time occupied the Pajarito Among the people nearest in physical type to those called plateau. Pajaritans are the Tarahumares,’® a forest people living along the of the Southwestern 18 Bandelier, Adolph F., Investigations among the Indians to the nature United States, Final Report, part i, p. 98: ‘«The Tarahumares, owing to which they danger of the country which they inhabited and to the constant cavities, natural in lived They rs. were exposed, were in many places cave-dwelle as well as in open air dwellings of mud, stone, or wood. titioned to suit their convenience; whole These caves they par- families, even small villages, occupying such troglodytan recesses. If the verbal information imparted to me lately is correct, the Tarahumares are, at the present time, and in a few secluded localiThe fact that the Taraties, still the cave-dwellers of the American continent. Cave-dwelling, on the humares dwelt at least partly in caves cannot be doubted. those whole, seems to have been quite common in the mountains of Chihuahua, in of Sonora bordering on Chihuahua, and in Sinaloa. In the Libro de Entierros de la Mision de Bacadehuachi, 1655, it is mentioned that the Janos and Jocomes ngs. used to surprise and kill the people of the Sierra Madre in their cave-dwelli In many places of the Sierra, the formation of rocks favors the existence of |