According to their own showing in the myths they were, while a masterful people, neither so numerous at the time of their coming, nor so advanced, nor so settled, as were the peoples whom they "overtook" from time to time as they neared the land of Zuñi or the "Middle of the world." They did not cultivate the soil, or, at least, apparently did not cultivate corn to any considerable extent before they met the first of these peoples, for, to use their own words, they were "ever seeking seeds of the grasses like birds on the mesas." There is abundant reason for supposing that the "elder nations"--these peoples whom they "overtook," the "People of the Dew," the "Black people," and the "Corn people" of the "towns builded round"--were direct and comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. The evidences of this are numerous and detailed, but only the principal of them need here be examined. The ruins of these rounded towns of the Corn tribes which Hernando de Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla saw in 1540 while going southeastward from Zuñi, are especially characteristic of the Zuñi region, and extend quite generally both southward toward the Rito Quemado and the Salinas in western central New Mexico, and, by way of the Chaco, northward nearly to the Colorado boundary. They are as often half round as they are wholly oblong or circular, and even when completely rounded or oval in outline are usually divided into two semicircular parts by an irregular court or series of courts extending lengthwise through the middle, and thus making them really double villages of the half-round type. A comparison of the ground plans of these round or semicircular ruins with those of the typical cliff ruins reveals the fact that they were simply cliff towns transferred, as it were, to the level of the open plains or mesa tops. Their outer or encircling walls were, save at the extremities of the courts, generally unbroken and perpendicular, as uninterrupted and sheer, almost, as were the natural canyon walls surrounding to the rearward the older cliff towns to which they thus corresponded and which they apparently were built to replace; and the houses descended like steps from these outer walls in terraced stories, facing, like the seats of an amphitheater, the open courts, precisely as descended the terraced stories of the cliff dwellings from the encircling rock walls of the sheltered ledges or shelves on which they were reared, necessarily facing in the same manner the open canyons below. Thus the courts may be supposed to have replaced the canyons, as the outer walls replaced the cliffs or the back walls built nearest them in the rear of at least the deeper village caves or shelters.