| OCR Text |
Show AMONG THE AZTECS. 285 The mummies show that trepanning, tooth- drawing, and amputation were practiced. They had timbrels, stringed instruments, drums, flutes and trumpets. Their principal city was supplied with water through lead pipes inlaid with gold, of which one was recovered entire, and now supplies the Convent of Santo Domingo. But the obscurity hanging over their history seems impenetrable. It is proved that this ancient people, both in the Ohio Valley and further south, must have had a tolerably regular government and a good system of agriculture to sustain a dense population; that they were often at war with a more savage people than themselves, and that they left our country at least five hundred more probably a thousand years ago. A score of theories have been projected. This civilization and these ruins have been in turn attributed to the Assyrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, " Lost Tribes of Israel," Greeks, Eomans, Malays, Northmen, and the Tartar expeditions sent out by Kublai Khan ; but each theory has in turn been proved untenable. The Book of Mor-mon tells with wearisome details how an Israelite family came to America six hundred years before Christ, gave rise to two nations who alternately built cities and battered them down in Avar, and finally the white half became extinct and the others turned to Indians ; and Orson Pratt has amplified the subject in a number of works which show the plausible absurdities of the astronomer run mad. Hence, in all Mormon literature, the Indians are spoken of as " Lam-anites" whom, for their wickedness, " God cursed with black skins." But the average Gentile mind is not equal to the task of swallowing such a story. But why should we assume that these people came from the Old World ? Is all civilization necessarily exotic ? There is nothing in these ruins particularly suggestive of Roman, Greek, or Egyptian architecture. We see in China that a spontaneous civilization arose and ran its peculiar course without any aid from Europe. In Europe we see that civilization began in the south and spread towards the north ; that it was overthrown by northern barbarians, again rose in the south and spread to the north. The latest investigators are of opinion that a similar movement took place in America: that civili-zation originated among the Colhuas in Peru and ancient Mayas in Yucatan ; that their successors, the Toltecs, carried it towards the north; that in the latitude of Ohio they met the northern barbarians and were slowly driven south, where civilization revived somewhat, and was again a'dvancing northward when the Spaniards came and destroyed it. In this theory the Toltecs are set down as our Mound- |
