According to all known anthropological standards the Amerind (as it has been agreed to designate the American Indian) bears a close affinity to the Mongolian races of Asia, and it must be admitted that the most likely origin that can be assigned to him is one in which Asiatic, or to be more exact, Mongolian blood preponderates. The period of his emigration, which probably spread itself over generations, was in all likelihood one at which the Mongolian type was not yet so fully specialised as not to admit of the acquirement under specific conditions of very marked structural and physiological attributes.[1] In recent years large numbers of Japanese have settled in Mexico, and in the native dress can hardly be distinguished from the Mexican peasants. Of course it would be unsafe to assume that, once settled in the Western Hemisphere, its populations were subject to none of those fluctuations or race-changes which are so marked a feature in the early history of European and Asiatic peoples. It is thought, and with justice, that some such race-movement convulsed the entire northern division of the continent at a period comparatively near to that of the Columbian discovery. Aztec history insists upon a prolonged migration for the race which founded the Mexican Empire, and native maps are still extant in several continental collections, which depict the routes taken by the Aztec conquerors from Aztlan, and the Toltecs from Tlapallan, their respective fatherlands in the north, to the Mexican Tableland. This, at least, would appear to be worthy of notice: that the 'Skraelings' or native Americans mentioned in the accounts of the tenth-century Norse discoverers of America, by the description given of them, do not appear to be the same race as that which inhabited the New England States upon their rediscovery. As regards the origin of the American mythologies it is difficult to discover traces of foreign influence in the religion of either Mexico or Peru. At the time of their subjugation by the Spaniards legends were ripe in both countries of beneficent white and bearded men, who brought with them a fully developed culture. The question of Asiatic influences must not altogether be cast aside as an untenable theory; but it is well to bear in mind that such influences, did they ever exist, must have been of the most transitory description, and could have left but few traces upon the religion of the peoples in question. If any such contact took place it was merely of an accidental nature, and, when speaking of faiths carried from Asia into America at the period of its original settlement, it is first necessary to premise that Pleistocene Man had already arrived at that stage of mental development in which the existence of supernatural beings is recognised--a premise with which modern anthropology would scarcely find itself in agreement.