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man mind, or derived its leading and suggestive features from _foreign lands_? There is intermingled with these inquiries, the scarcely less important one, whether or not, the _antiquarian ruins of America_, denote an element or elements of _European population_, in the later eras, whose fate became involved in the hunter mass, and who may be supposed to have been completely obliterated from the traditions of the existing tribes, prior to the discovery by Columbus. Indian tradition has little or nothing to offer on this head. Time and barbarism have blotted out all. The entire sum of the traditions of all the various races of Red men, on the continent, when sifted from the mass of fabulous and incongruous matter by which it is accompanied, and when there is any allusion to it at all, amounts to this: that their ancestors came from the east; a few tribes, assert that they had come by water.[9] The land from whence they set out, the time devoted to the purposes of their long migration, and the actual period of their landing, and all such questions, are indefinite. And we must re-construct their chronology, in the best way possible, from a careful system of patient historical and antiquarian induction. Exactitude it cannot have, but it may reach plausibility. Granting to the Scandinavian, the Cimbrian and the Italian periods of adventure, which have been named, the fullest limits, in point of antiquity, which have under any circumstances been claimed, we cannot carry even this species of history beyond the year A. D. 1001; leaving 999 years to be accounted for, to the commencement of the Christian era. The Aztec empire which had reached such a point of magnificence when Mexico was first entered by Cortez, in 1519, did not, according to the picture writings and Mexican chronologists, date back farther than 1038, or by another authority, 958. The Toltecs, who preceded them in the career of empire, and whom together with the Chichimecs and their allies they overthrew, do not, allowing them the most liberal latitude of authors, extend their reign beyond A. D. 667. Prior to this, Indian chronology makes mention of the Olmecs--a people who are described as having mechanical arts, and to whom even the Toltecs ascribed the erection of some of their most antique and magnificent monuments. According to Fernando D'Alva, himself of Aztec lineage, the most ancient date assigned to the entire group of Mexican dynasties is A. D. 299. Th
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