Now, if the mothers of the American race came from any of the early advanced sections or outskirts of Eastern civilization, they brought the distaff and spindle with them, yet nothing of the kind was found at the conquest. It cannot of course be imagined that they, or their descendants, could have been induced to throw the former away, and to embarrass the movements of the latter in a calabash or basket. Efficient previous practice, and acquired habits and expertness, could never have been laid aside for such rude, and laborious, and unproductive substitutes. We know that the distaff and spindle have never been lost where once known, in the old world. Neither civil commotions or revolutions, nor duration of time, affected them, in Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Italy, Carthage, Persia, Scythia, Asia-Minor, or any of the great or small theatres of past history. The laws, learning, science, arts, and races, which once flourished in those countries, have mostly vanished, but women still spin there as they did thirty or forty centuries ago; and so it is here also. The principal mechanical devices of the old Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Peruvians, Chilians, &c., are no longer known; the means by which the stone architecture, the basaltic and porphyritic sculptures of Cusco, Uxmal, Copan, Palenque, and other Aztec remains scattered over the continent, were achieved, are a puzzle; yet the household labors of Indian women in those lands remain unchanged, they spin and weave with the same apparatus, and embroider, as did their kindred in and before the times of Atahualpa and Montezuma. Admitting that repeated emigrations took place at periods remote as that of the Iliad, and up to the twelfth century of our era, that arrivals, designed or fortuitous, thus occurred, on either the Atlantic or the Pacific, or both coasts--we might still more confidently expect to find the distaff and spindle of the other hemisphere domiciled in this. If they were brought at all, it was in hands practiced in their use, and tenacious of their worth. But from the Cape of Storms in the south, to the limits of human abodes in the north, instead of these the most awkward contrivances prevailed when the whites came, and such still are found to prevail. The inference therefore seems inevitable that the first colonists, and their successors for many ages, came before spinning was known in their native places, or at least before the distaff had been added to the spindle; and that the art, as practised by the Aztecs and their successors in Central America at the present day, is purely of aboriginal development, and of remote antiquity, and had not before the Conquest come in contact with the better processes of the other hemisphere.