The Llanos are, indeed, well suited to the rearing of cattle, but the care of animals yielding milk[26] was almost unknown to the original inhabitants of the New Continent. Hardly any of the American tribes have ever availed themselves of the advantages which nature offered them in this respect. The American race (which, with the exception of the Esquimaux, is one and the same from 65° North to 55° South latitude), has not passed from the state of hunters to that of cultivators of the soil through the intermediate stage of a pastoral life. Two kinds of native cattle (the Buffalo and the Musk Ox) feed in the northern prairies of western Canada and the plains of arctic America, in Quivira, and around the colossal ruins of the Aztec fortress which rises in the wilderness, like an American Palmyra, on the solitary banks of the Gila. The long-horned Rocky Mountain Sheep abounds on the arid limestone rocks of California. The Vicunas, Huanacos, Alpacas, and Lamas, belong to South America; but the two first named of all these useful animals, _i. e._, the Buffalo and the Musk Ox, have retained their natural freedom for two thousand years, and the use of milk and cheese, like the possession and cultivation of farinaceous grasses,[27] has remained a distinguishing characteristic of the nations of the old world. If some of the latter have crossed from northern Asia to the west coast of America, and if, keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions,[28] they have followed the lofty ridge of the Andes towards the south, their migration must have taken place by ways in which they could not be accompanied by their flocks and herds, or bring with them the cultivation of corn. When the long shaken empire of the Hiongnu fell, may we conjecture that the movement of this powerful tribe may also have occasioned in the north-east of China and in Corea a shock and an impulse which may have caused civilized Asiatics to pass over into the new continent? If such a migration had consisted of inhabitants of the Steppes in which agriculture was not pursued, this hazardous hypothesis (which has hitherto been but little favoured by the comparison of languages) would at least explain the striking absence of the Cereals in America. Possibly one of those Asiatic priestly colonies whom mystic dreams sometimes impelled to embark in long voyages, (of which the history of the peopling of Japan[29] in the time of Thsinchi-huang-ti offers a memorable example), may have been driven by storms to the coasts of New California.