Sidenote: Mexicans, Peruvians, Pueblos, Cliff-Dwellers, and Indians of the lower Mississippi valley. I. The semi-civilized peoples represented by the sun-worshipping Mexicans and Peruvians, who had attained particular efficiency in architecture, road-making, and fortification, acquired some knowledge of astronomy, were facile if not elegant in sculpture, practised many handicrafts, but appear to have exhibited little capacity for further progress. Their government was paternal to a degree nowhere else observed, and the people, exercising neither political power nor individual judgment in the conduct of many of the common affairs of life, were helpless when deprived of their native rulers by the Spanish conquerors, Cortez and Pizarro. Closely upon the border of this division, both geographically and in point of mental status, were the Pueblos and Cliff-Dwellers of New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California,--the occupants of the country around the headwaters of the Rio Grande and Gila rivers, and of the foot-hills of the Desert Range. These people, like the Mexicans, lived in great communal dwellings of stone or sun-dried brick, and were also sun-worshippers. They made crude cloth and pottery, and irrigated and cultivated large tracts of arid land, but were inferior as fighters, and occupied a mental plane considerably below the Mexicans. Allied in race and similar in acquirements were the tribes inhabiting the lower Mississippi valley, the Natchez and perhaps other tribes lying farther to the east. Sidenote: The Red Indians of North America. II. The natives of North America, called Red Indians,--a name which perpetuates the geographical error of Columbus, and has given rise to an erroneous opinion as to their color--occupied a still lower plane of civilization. Yet one must be cautious in accepting any hard-and-fast classification. The North Americans presented a considerable variety of types, ranging from the Southern Indians, some of whose tribes were rather above the Caribs in material advancement, and quite superior to them in mental calibre, down to the Diggers, the savage root-eaters of the Cordilleran region. Sidenote: Philological divisions of Red Indian tribes. The migrations of some of the Red Indian tribes were frequent, and they occupied overlapping territories, so that it is impossible to fix the tribal boundaries with any degree of exactness. Again, the tribes were so merged by intermarriage, by affiliation, by consolidation, by the fact that there were numerous polyglot villages of renegades, by similarities in manner, habits, and appearance, that it is difficult even to separate the savages into families. It is only on philological grounds that these divisions can be made at all. In a general way we may say that between the Atlantic and the Rockies, Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, there were four Indian languages in vogue, with great varieties of local dialect. Sidenote: The Algonquians.