alay. Nor could
the Indians themselves have become so extraordinarily diverse except
during the lapse of thousands of years. The Quichua of the cold
highlands of Peru is as different from the Maya of Yucatan or the Huron
of southern Canada as the Swede is from the Armenian or the Jew.
The separation of one stock from another has gone so far that almost
countless languages have been developed. In the United States alone
the Indians have fifty-five "families" of languages and in the whole of
America there are nearly two hundred such groups. These comprise over
one thousand distinct languages which are mutually unintelligible and at
least as different as Spanish and Italian. Such differences might arise
in a day at the Tower of Babel, but in the processes of evolution they
take thousands of years.

During those thousands of years the red man, in spite of his Arctic
handicap, by no means showed himself wholly lacking in originality and
inventive ability. In Yucatan two or three thousand years ago the Mayas
were such good scientists and recorded their observations of the stars
so accurately that they framed a calendar more exact than any except
the one that we have used for the last two centuries. They showed still
greater powers of mind in inventing the art of writing and in their
architecture. Later we shall depict the environment under which these
things occurred; it is enough to suggest in passing that perhaps at this
period the ancestors of the Indians had capacities as great as those of
any people. Today they might possibly hold their own against the white
man, were it not for the great handicap which they once suffered because
Asia approaches America only in the cold, depressing north.

The Indians were not the only primitive people who were driven from
central Asia by aridity. Another group pushed westward toward Europe.
They fared far better than their Indian cousins who went to the
northeast. These prospective Europeans never encountered benumbing
physical conditions like those of northeastern Asia and northwestern
America. Even when ice shrouded the northern part of Europe, the rest of
the continent was apparently favored with a stimulating climate. Then
as now, Europe was probably one of the regions where storms are most
frequent. Hence it was free from the monotony which is so deadly in
other regions. When the ice retreated our European ancestors doubtless
followed slowly in its wake. Thus their racial characte