It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have learnt from the white man since the year 1500--and unhappily they learned from him much evil, as well as good--they still represent what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes. They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds. [Sidenote: The Red Indian] Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting some supernatural creature of unknown powers. But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are species intermediate between the sheep and the camels. Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of America from passing into the pastoral stage. {16}