mutually unintelligible and at least as different as Spanish and
Italian. Such differences might arise in a day at the Tower of
Babel, but in the processes of evolution they take thousands of
years.

During those thousands of years the red man, in spite of his
Arctic handicap, by no means showed himself wholly lacking in
originality and inventive ability. In Yucatan two or three
thousand years ago the Mayas were such good scientists and
recorded their observations of the stars so accurately that they
framed a calendar more exact than any except the one that we have
used for the last two centuries. They showed still greater powers
of mind in inventing the art of writing and in their
architecture. Later we shall depict the environment under which
these things occurred; it is enough to suggest in passing that
perhaps at this period the ancestors of the Indians had
capacities as great as those of any people. Today they might
possibly hold their own against the white man, were it not for
the great handicap which they once suffered because Asia
approaches America only in the cold, depressing north.

The Indians were not the only primitive people who were driven
from central Asia by aridity. Another group pushed westward
toward Europe. They fared far better than their Indian cousins
who went to the northeast. These prospective Europeans never
encountered benumbing physical conditions like those of
northeastern Asia and northwestern America. Even when ice
shrouded the northern part of Europe, the rest of the continent
was apparently favored with a stimulating climate. Then as now,
Europe was probably one of the regions where storms are most