Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Stewart Culin, who has made a profound study of the
games of the world, and Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing, the distinguished
student of the ethnology of southern North America, are both convinced
that this game had an independent origin in various parts of the world.
Mexican divisions of time marked by five colors are recognized as being
allied to a similar device in China. The application of colors to the
meaning of certain ideographs is common in other parts of the world as
well. It is important to remark that the colors named include nearly the
whole category as selected by barbarous people, and in the use of colors
in this way it would be difficult to avoid similarities.
The evidences of contact in early times must be settled by the
comparison of early relics of the two shores of the Pacific.
Resemblances there are, and none will dispute them, but that they are
fortuitous and have no value in the discussion is unquestionable. As
illustrations of these fortuitous resemblances may be cited a tazza from
the United States of Colombia having a high support with triangular
perforations identical in form with that of a similar object found
among the mortuary vessels of Korea, and Greece as well. A curious,
three-lobed knob of a pot rim, so common in the shell mounds of Omori,
Japan, has its exact counterpart in the shell mounds of the upper
Amazon. In the Omori pottery a peculiar curtain-shaped decoration on a
special form of jar has its exact parallel in the ancient pottery of
Porto Rico. These instances might be multiplied, but such coincidences
as are often seen in the identity of certain words are familiar to all
students. The account of the land of Fusang appears in the records of
the Liang dynasty contained in the Nanshi, or History of the South,
written by Li Yen-Shau, who lived in the beginning of the seventh
century. It purports to have been told by a monk who returned from
the land of Fusang in 499 of our era. This hypothetical region has
been believed to be Japan, Saghalin, and Mexico. The record is filled
with fabulous statements of impossible animals, trees of impossible
dimensions, and is so utterly beyond credence in many ways that it
should have no weight as evidence. If it had any foundation in fact,
then one might infer that some traveler had entered Saghalin from the
north, had crossed to Yeso and Japan, and found his way back to China.
His own recollections, supplemented by stories told him by others,
would form the substance of his account. The record is brief, but any
one familiar with Japan as Klaproth was is persuaded with him that
the account refers to Japan and adjacent regions. The twenty thousand
_li_ the monk is said to have traveled may parallel his mulberry trees
several thousand feet high and his silkworms seven feet long. In a
more remote Chinese record, as mentioned by Dr. Gustave Schlegel, the
statement is made that the inhabitants had to dig down ten thousand feet
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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