e is not a single
authentic instance of a pastoral tribe, not one of an animal raised for
its milk,[21-1] nor for the transportation of persons, and very few for
their flesh. It was essentially a hunting race. The most civilized
nations looked to the chase for their chief supply of meat, and the
courts of Cuzco and Mexico enacted stringent game and forest laws, and
at certain periods the whole population turned out for a general crusade
against the denizens of the forest. In the most densely settled
districts the conquerors found vast stretches of primitive woods.

If we consider the life of a hunter, pitting his skill and strength
against the marvellous instincts and quick perceptions of the brute,
training his senses to preternatural acuteness, but blunting his more
tender feelings, his sole aim to shed blood and take life, dependent on
luck for his food, exposed to deprivations, storms, and long
wanderings, his chief diet flesh, we may more readily comprehend that
conspicuous disregard of human suffering, those sanguinary rites, that
vindictive spirit, that inappeasable restlessness, which we so often
find in the chronicles of ancient America. The law with reason objects
to accepting a butcher as a juror on a trial for life; here is a whole
race of butchers.

The one mollifying element was agriculture. On the altar of Mixcoatl,
god of hunting, the Aztec priest tore the heart from the human victim
and smeared with the spouting blood the snake that coiled its lengths
around the idol; flowers and fruits, yellow ears of maize and clusters
of rich bananas decked the shrine of Centeotl, beneficent patroness of
agriculture, and bloodless offerings alone were her appropriate dues.
This shows how clear, even to the native mind, was the contrast between
these two modes of subsistence. By substituting a sedentary for a
wandering life, by supplying a fixed dependence for an uncertain
contingency, and by admonishing man that in preservation, not in
destruction, lies his most remunerative sphere of activity, we can
hardly estimate too highly the wide distribution of the zea mays. This
was their only cereal, and it was found in cultivation from the southern
extremity of Chili to the fiftieth parallel of north latitude, beyond
which limits the low temperature renders it an uncertain crop. In their
legends it is represented as the gift of the Great Spirit (Chipeways),
brought from the terrestrial Paradise by the sacred animals (Quic