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
to obtain blue tenacious clay for roofing tiles! A number of ardent
writers convinced that signs of Chinese contact are seen in the relics
of middle America have seized upon this account of Fusang in support of
this belief. These convictions have arisen by finding it difficult to
believe that the ancient civilizations of Mexico and Peru could have
been indigenous. In seeking for an exterior origin in the Fusang account
overweight has been credited to every possible resemblance, and all
discrepancies have been ignored.
The fabulous account of the land of Fusang evidently supplied
documentary evidence, and Mexico was conceived to be the mythical
Fusang. Mr. Vining goes so far as to declare that "some time in the past
the nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America were powerfully
affected by the introduction of Asiatic arts, customs, and religious
belief." To establish the details in the Chinese account the entire
western hemisphere is laid under contribution: now it is the buffalo
of North America, then the llama of Peru, the reindeer of the arctic,
or some native word. These writers do not hesitate to bring to life
animals that became extinct in the upper Tertiaries, and to account for
the absence of others by supposing them to have become extinct. Literal
statements of horses dragging wheeled vehicles are interpreted as an
allusion in Buddhist cult which refers by metaphor to attributes and not
to actual objects. As an illustration of the wild way in which some of
these resemblances are established, Mr. Vining quotes the account of M.
José Perez (_Revue Orientale et Américaine_, vol. viii). Perez reminds
us that the inhabitants of the New World gave Old World names to places
in the new continent, citing New York, New Orleans, and New Brunswick as
examples, and then says that at some remote epoch the Asiatics had given
to the cities of the New World the same names as the cities of their
mother country; so the name of the famous Japanese city Ohosaka (Osaka),
to the west of the Pacific, became Oaxaca in Mexico on the eastern side.
Now it is well known that the ancient name of Osaka was Namihawa; this
became corrupted into Naniwa, and not till 1492 does the name Osaka
appear. Rev. J. Summers gives a full account of these successive names
with their meanings (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,
vol. vii, part iv). The real question to be answered is not what might
have been accomplished by ancient explorers from Asia, but what was
accomplished. It is shown that Chinese Buddhist priests went to India
in the years 388, 399, 629, and so on, and the question is asked, Why
may they not have reached Mexico on the east? Migration on parallels of
latitude with no intervening ocean is one matter; to go from latitude
30° on one side of the Pacific almost to the Arctic Ocean, and down on
the other side nearly to the equator, is quite another exploit. It is
assumed that five priests had gone to Mexico in 468 A.D., and there
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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