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