The Llanos are, it is true, adapted for the breeding of cattle, but the primitive inhabitants of the new continent were almost wholly unacquainted with the management of animals yielding milk[26]. Scarcely one of the American tribes knew how to avail themselves of the advantages which nature, in this respect, had placed before them. The American aborigines, who, from 65° north lat. to 55° south lat., constitute (with the exception, perhaps, of the Esquimaux,) but one sole race, passed directly from a hunting to an agricultural life without going through the intermediate stage of a pastoral life. Two species of indigenous homed cattle (the Buffalo and the Musk Ox) graze on the pasture lands of Western Canada and Quivira, as well as in the neighbourhood of the colossal ruins of the Aztek fortress, which rises like some American Palmyra on the desert solitudes of the river Gila. A long-horned _Mouflon_, resembling the so-called progenitor of the sheep, roams over the parched and barren limestone rocks of California; while the camel-like Vicunas, Huanacos, Alpacas, and Llamas, are natives of the southern peninsula. But of these useful animals the two first only (viz. the Buffalo and the Musk Ox) have preserved their natural freedom for thousands of years. The use of milk and cheese, like the possession and culture of farinaceous grasses, is a distinctive characteristic of the nations of the old world[27]. If some few tribes have passed through Northern Asia to the western coast of America, and preferring to keep within a temperate climate, have followed the course of the ridges of the Andes southward[28], such migrations must have been made by routes on which the settlers were unable to transport either flocks or grain. The question here arises, whether on the downfall of the long-declining empire of the Hiongnu, the consequent migration of this powerful race may not have been the means of drawing from the north-east of China and Korea, bands of settlers, by whom Asiatic civilisation was transported to the new continent? If the primitive colonists had been natives of those Steppes in which agriculture was unknown, this bold hypothesis (which as yet is but little warranted by etymological comparisons) would at all events explain the remarkable absence of the Cereals in America. Perhaps contrary winds may have driven to the shores of New California one of those Asiatic Priest-colonies who were instigated by their mystic dreameries to undertake distant voyages, and of which the history of the peopling of Japan, at the time of the _Thsinschihuang-ti_, affords a memorable instance.[29]