THE ORIGIN OF THE MEXICAN CIVILIZATION PRELIMINARY NOTICE

Aztecs had no useful domesticated animals. And we have seen that they employed bronze, as a substitute for iron, for all mechanical purposes. The bison, or wild cow of America, however, which ranges in countless herds over the magnificent prairies of the west, yields milk like the tame animal of the same species in Asia and Europe;⁹⁹ and iron was scattered in large masses over the surface of the table-land. Yet there have been people considerably civilized in Eastern Asia who were almost equally strangers to the use of milk.¹⁰⁰ The buffalo range was not so much on the western coast as on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains;¹⁰¹ and the migratory Aztec might well doubt whether the wild, uncouth monsters whom he occasionally saw bounding with such fury over the distant plains were capable of domestication, like the meek animals which he had left grazing in the green pastures of Asia. Iron, too, though met with on the surface of the ground, was more tenacious, and harder to work, than copper, which he also found in much greater quantities on his route. It is possible, moreover, that his migration may have been previous to the time when iron was used by his nation; for we have seen more than one people in the Old World employing bronze and copper with entire ignorance, apparently, of any more serviceable metal.¹⁰²—Such is the explanation, unsatisfactory, indeed, but the best that suggests itself, of this curious anomaly.