f
invisible agents, are strikingly different from those of nations
who have never emerged from primitive barbarism. Another fact which
tends, as M. Martius observes, to confirm the opinion that natives
of the New World have fallen from a state of greater refinement, is
their use, from immemorial ages, of certain domesticated animals
and cultivated plants, and the notions which they entertained of
the first acquisition of these possessions. Of such animals and
plants the people of the Old World have their peculiar stock, and
the American nations have their own entirely different.

"In the Old World we know not whence our horses, our dogs, cattle,
and the various kinds of cerealian gramina were obtained, and the
American nations are equally at a loss, when we enquire for the
original stock of the dumb dog of the Mexicans, the llama, the root
of the mandioca, the American corn, and of the quinoa.

"In the ancient world there were traditions of some mythical
benefactors of mankind. Ceres, Triptolemus, Bacchus, Pallas, and
Poseidon, who had contributed their gifts, corn and wine, the
sacred olive, and the horse, and we infer that all these had been
known from periods of remote antiquity.

"In America, likewise, tradition refers the knowledge of cultivated
plants and domestic animals, and the art of tilling the earth, to
some fabulous person who descended from the gods, or suddenly made
his appearance among their ancestors, such as the Manco-Capac of
the Peruvians, and the Xolotl and the Xiuhtlato of the Tollecas and
Chicimecas.

"The remains of ancient sculpture and architecture spread over
Mexico, Yucatan, and Chiapa, as well as over the high plain of
Quito and other parts of South America, and the extensive works of
art, consisting of fortifications and other relics, discovered in
the Tenessi country, as well as in the inland parts of New Mexico
on the Rio Gila, afford some further support to the hypothesis of
M. Martius.

"The possession of arts and acquirements, the most simple
improvements of human life, and such as belong to the very infancy
of human society, distinctively appropriate, and the origin of
which is recorded by mythical legends peculiar to each division of
mankind, seems to carry back the era of their separation to the