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On the Translation of Myths Between the Old And: Falb

Again, "Dr. Rudolf Falb* discovers that the language spoken by the Indians in Peru and Bolivia, especially in Quichua and Aymara, exhibits the most astounding affinities with the Semitic languages, and particularly with the Arabic -in which tongue Dr. Falb himself has been skilled from his boyhood. Following up the links of this discovery, he has first found a connecting link with the Aryan roots, and, secondly, has arrived face to face with the surprising revelation that the Semitic roots are universally Aryan. The common stems of all the variants are found in their purest condition in Quichua and Aymara, from which fact Dr. Falb derives the conclusion that the high plains of Peru and Bolivia must be regarded as the point of exit of the present human race." / On the other hand, Mr. E. B. Tylor, in the course of an article upon Backgammon among the Aztecs,† which he argues must have reached them from Asia, and very likely through Mexico, points out that the myths and religion of the North American tribes contain many fancies well known to Asia, which they were hardly likely to have hit upon independently, and which they had not learned from white men : "Such as the quaint belief that the world is a monstrous tortoise floating on the waters; and an idea which the Sioux have in common with the Tartars, that it is sinful to chop or poke with a sharp instrument the burning log on the fire." He quotes Alexander von Humboldt as having "argued years ago that the Mexicans did and believed things which were at once so fanciful and so like the fancies of the Asiatics that there must have been communication. Would two nations," he asks, " have taken independently to forming calendars of days and years by repeating and combining cycles of animals, such as tiger, dog, ape, hare, &c.? Would they have deve- * Scientific American, Jan. 24, 1880. + Macmillan's Magazine, quoted in Pop. Sci. Monthly, No. 82. OLD AND NEW WORLD MYTHS. loped independently similar astrological fancies about these signs governing the periods they began, and being influential each over a particular limb or organ of men's bodies? Would they, again, have evolved separately out of this consciousness the myths of the world and its inhabitants having, at the end of several successive periods, been destroyed by elemental catastrophes?"

He adds, "It may very well have been the same agency which transported to Mexico the art of bronze-making, the computation of time by periods of dogs and apes, the casting of nativity, and the playing of backgammon."

Then, again, we have the theory of those, now indeed few in number, who hold that the present Indian inhabitants of America were a distinctly indigenous race. Lord Kaimes, in his Sketches of the History of Man, says, "I venture still further, which is to conjecture that America has not been peopled from any part of the Old World." Voltaire had preceded him in this line of argument, relying on ridicule rather than on reason. "The same persons that readily admit that the beavers of Canada are of Canadian origin, assert that the men must have come there in boats, and that Mexico must have been peopled by some of the descendants of Magog."* Missionaries of various sects have endeavoured to identify the Red man with the lost ten tribes. Adair conceived the language of the Southern Indians to be a corruption of Hebrew, and the Jesuit Lafitan, in his history of the savages of America, maintained that the Caribee language was radically Hebrew. Mr. John Josselyn,† in an account of the Mohawks, states that their language is a dialect of the Tartars, and Dr. Williamson, in his history of North Carolina, considers it * Euvres, I. 7, pp. 197, 198. + Two Voyages to New England, p. 124, London, 1673. can hardly be questioned that the Indians of South America are descended from a class of the Hindoos in the southern part of Asia.