The evolution of mind / by Joseph McCabe.

  • Joseph McCabe
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of mind / by Joseph McCabe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    haired race across the ancient land-bridge to America. If the Eskimo are, as is generally sup- posed, a branch of the race that thus wandered afoot from Siberia to north-east America, they afford an interesting glimpse of the early Mongolic people. Surrounded by their repellent deserts of ice, they have received little or no stimulus from other peoples until recent times. Flinging off these regi- ments into the Arctic as it passed—if the current theory be true—the main advancing body poured into, and spread over, America, and developed into the Amerinds. Native American culture had no stimulus from the rest of the world until the advent of the Spaniards. From the Eskimo of the north, or the Caribs of the centre, or the Botocudos of the south, we find every grade of culture up to the re- markable civilisations of Mexico and Peru and Yucatan. It is not without significance that the higher advances of the Amerinds take place in central positions, with obvious traces of the conflict of peoples, but they need not detain us. I would only observe that these civilisations were advancing at the time the Spaniards came, to reduce them eventually to barbarism. In Peru the priestly de- mands for infants’ blood had been resisted to the extent that the babies were no longer killed. In Mexico we find a prince building a temple in which a new cult, with flowers substituted for human sacrifices, was to be inaugurated. From these abortive developments, in which the needful stimulus is either entirely wanting, or feeble
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