OCR Text |
Show 144 STEPPES AND DESERTS. forest which then extended from the foot of the volcano of Pichincha to the spot in question. The monks, whom I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them the inscription on the earthen vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the old German dialect, and was-" Whoso drinks from me let him not forget his God." I too felt with the monks that this old German drinking vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been preserved everywhere in the New Continent the names, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who first intrusted to it these its fruits, so early associated with the civilization of mankind in the Old Continent! In respect generally to the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affinities of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that 11 such indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care of cattle: herdsmen, when dispersed, had still much in common, whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new words. But the fact that, in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear nearly on a par with the Germans and Sclavonians, argues in favor of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian 'java' (Frumentum hordeum), compared with the Lithuanian 'jawai,' and the Finnish 'jywa/ offers a singular exception." (.Jac. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, th. i. s. 69.) ( 28) p. 34.-11Keeping by preference to tlte cooler mountm·n regions." Throughout Mexico and Peru the traces of a great degree of civilization are confined to the elevated plateaux. "\Ve have seen on the Andes the ruins of palaces and baths at heights between 1600 and 1800 toises (10,230 and 11,510 English feet). It can only have been men of a northern race, who, migrating from the north towards the south, could find delight in such a climate. (29) p. 34.-" The history of tl~e peopling of Japan." The probability of the western nations of theN ew Continent having had communication with the east of Asia long before the arrival of |