TYLOR'S TRAVELS IN CUBA AND MEXICO.* IT does not always
rain in Ireland, nor is there always civil war in Mexico. Mr. Tylor and his companion Mr. Christy had actually the good fortune to complete a four months' tour in the republic, in the spring and summer of 1856, and to find the whole land at peace except the city of Puebla, where the farce of a siege was played out between their arrival and their departure. During the previous ten years, a new revolution had happened once in every eight months on an average ; and subsequently there has been nothing but civil war in its worst form. The visit of the two Englishmen was, therefore, singularly well timed, and they appear to have made very good use of the opportunities they enjoyed. They made long excursions be- tween the seaboard and the capital, and northward and southwestward of the latter, exploring remarkable places and rains, botanizing by the way, gathering a large stock of antiquities, and examining the physical characteristics of the country, and the habits and condition of its inhabitants, with a close and enlightened scrutiny. The volume compiled by one of them, from the memorandum-books and letters of both, is greatly superior to the general run of books of travel. It is full of matter, but never tedious, is perfectly free from all kinds of literary affectations and trickeries, and is written with an easy vivacity and freshness of manner that give it much of the charm one finds in the conversation of a lively and full-minded companion. Before he takes us with him to Vera erns, Mr. Tylor gives us a glimpse of Cuba, and the adjacent Isle of Pines, once the favourite resort of the pirates of the Spanish main. It is now a place where the Cubans most delight to rusticate and bathe, and it serves as a place of settlement for those free black inhabitants of Florida who, chose to leave that country when it was given up to the United. States. Our travellers paid a regular round of visits to these settlers, were delighted with their pleasant simple ways, and very much doubted Whether any social condition could be better than theirs for the black inhabitants of the West Indies. "They are not a hard- working people, it is true ; but hard work in the climate of the tropics is unnatural, and can only be brought about by unnatural means. That they are not sunk in utter laziness one can see by their neat cottages and trim gardens. Their state does not correspond. with the idea of prosperity of the political economist, who would have them work hard to produce sugar, rum, and tobacco, that they might earn money to spend in crockery and Manchester goods; but it is suited to the race and to the climate. If we measure prosperity by the enjoyment of life, their condition is an enviable one." In one of the houses of the Floridan colony, Mr. Tylor found a white man, a Spaniard, who was married to a black woman—a fact which naturally surprised him after his experience of the United States. Such marriages, he says, are not uncommon in Cuba; and the climate of the island is not unfavourable for the mixed negro and European race, while to the pure whites it is deadly, and it is only by continual supplies of emigrants from Europe that they are preserved from ex- tinction. In all our West India islands except Bermuda, as Mr. Anthony Trollope has shown, the white planters are fast receding before the coloured races, and will ultimately be supplanted by them altogether, and the same thing will happen in Cuba, if ever slavery be abolished there ; but that event is at this moment more remote in prospect than ever. In the Isle of Pines our travellers became acquainted with a * Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. By Edward B. Tylor. Longman and Co.
middle-aged ecclesiastic, with a pleasant face and an unfailing supply of good-humoured fun; yet his life was one of incessant labour as superintendent of several charitable institutions. He was a universal favourite, and possessed in an extraordinary degree the gift of winning the confidence of all who approached him. 'Though a Spaniard, he had been brought up in the Lazarist College iu Paris, the training school of the French missionaries in China. Now says Mr. Tylor-
" I should not have said so much of our friend the Padre, were it not that I think there is a moral to be got out of him. I believe he may be taken as a type, not indeed of Roman Catholic missionaries in general, but of a certain class among them, who are of considerable importance in the missionary world, though there are not many of them. Taking the Padre as a sample of his class, as I think we may—judging from the accounts of them we meet with in books, it is curious to notice how the point in which their system is strongest is just that in which the Protestant system is weakest, that is, in social training and deport- ment. What a number of men go to India with the best intentions, and set to work at once, flinging their doctrines at the natives before they have learned in the least to understand what the said natives' minds are like or how they work, dropping at once upon their pet prejudices, mortally offending them as a pre- liminary step towards arguing with them, and in short stroking the cat of society backwards in the most conscientious manner. By the time they have accom- plished this satisfactory result, a man like our Cuban Padre, though he may have argued but little and preached even less, would have a hundred natives bound to him by strong personal attachment, and ready to accept anything from him in the way of teaching." The two travellers arrived in the city of Mexico at the beginning of the Holy Week. Monday,. Tuesday, and Wednesday were only distinguished by the crowding of the churches with men and women waiting their turn at the confessional, but the fun began on Thurs- day after mass. All carriages disappeared from the streets, the church bells were silent, and a wonderful wooden machine like a water-wheel, which had been put up the day before, and had greatly puzzled the English strangers, was set to work. This was la matraca, the rattle, which struck the hours, and occasionally went off into furious fits of clattering, without apparent reason, for ten minutes at a time. Besides this, everybody in the streets, old and young, rich and poor, was walking about with a hand implement of the same kind and working it like mad. These rattles stand for Judas's bones, and all good Catholics express in this odd way their desire to break them ; and this is but a preliminary measure, for Judas himself, in paste- board, is carried about and insulted until Saturday morning, blown up with a packet of powder on his inside and a slow match, and finally finished off in a bonfire, just as was done to an effigy of Mr. Lincoln the other day in New Orleans. The first sight of these pasteboard Jndases convinced our countrymen that they "had unexpectedly come upon the old custom, of which our proeessions and burning,s of Guy Fawkes in England are merely an adaptation. After giving up the old custom as a Popish rite, what a bright idea to revive it in this new shape, and to give the boys something to carry about, bang, blow up, and make a final bonfire of, and all in the Protestant interest."
What was the true condition of the Mexican people when they fell under the Spanish yoke ? Three American authors, the late Mr. Albert Gallatin, General Cass, and Mr. R. A. Wilson, have main- tained that the accounts of the empire, capital, and people of Montezuma, given by Cortez and the Spanish historians, were not
The Debate between the Church and Science; or, the ancient Hebraic Idea of the Six Days of Creation. Andover: Warren F. Draper; London: Triibner and Co.—The object proposed to himself by the anonymous author of this American publication is the vindication of the fieent accounts given of them by the conquerors, a much longer time views put forward by Professor Tayler Lewis, L.L.D., in his treatise entitled The Six Days of Creation. The mode of _proceeding which he rs
would have been necessary in any country to cause their entire dis- has adopted as best calculated to attain this end is that of giving a appearance. These are the opinions of able men, well versed in brief abstract of these views, preceded by a vicious attack upon Pro- American ethnology, and of whom one at least has laboriously lessors Dana and Barrows, who had ventured to criticise Dr. Lewis's studied the Aztec question on the spot. Mr. Tylor's views are
totally opposed to theirs. When he and his companion left Eng- workh,eaducl followed by an essay on the literary character of his distin- land, they both believed that the historians of the conquest had not verywehcadna maa)cec out, Dr. Lewis advocated the ryPnroaeveel theory 1.that exaggerated the numbers of the population and the size of the cities; ages; and was further of opinion tyhat "in Creation, fieapareassenresvaetzlegef "but," he says, "our examination of Mexican remains soon induced existence of a primal substanceless substance is assumed, upon which us to withdraw this accusation, and even made us inclined to blame the Spirit of God puts forth its energies :" a speculation of whose value the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that we are disqnplified for attempting to form an estimate by our unfor- surrounded them." This is putting the case rather strongly, and tunate ignorance as to what kind of thing a " substaneeless substance" Mr. Tylor seems to feel that some abatement is necessary, for he adds : "I do not mean by this that we felt inclined to swallow the monstrous exaggerations of Solis and Gomara and other Spanish chroniclers, who seemed to think that it was as easy to say thousand as a hundred, and that it sounded much better. But when this class of writers are set aside, and the more valuable authorities severely criticized, it does not seem to us that the history thus ex- tracted from these sources is much less reliable than European history of the same period. There is perhaps no better way of ex- pressing this opinion than to say that what we saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott's 'History of the Conquest,' and but seldom to make his statements appear to us improbable." We confess that we are more sceptical as to their general authenticity, and that al though Mr. Tylor's descriptions of what he actually saw are always interesting, we do not always acquiesce in his inferences or his as- mimptions. He believes, for instance, in the authenticity of Aztec pictures, which were manufactured in the second generation after the conquest, were announced then as copies of unseen originals, and were certainly forgeries. At the period we have mentioned there sprang merely e ration.s, but fabrications. According to these writera indeed, he. has c.ertamly demonstrated that any such censure—unless,
the pretended empire was only a confederation of Indian tribes a indeed,.it be directed not against doctrines but against men—will have little less erratic and savage than the hordes beyond them to the north, and the floating gardens and magnificent buildings of the Aztec and love of fair play: and we s ecially commend his pam hlet to those capital never existed. They allege that Mexico has no buildings or fragments of buildings anterior to the conquest, and that there are none throughout the entire continent north and south except those which Mr. Wilson claims as Phcenician. Two centuries after the con- quest, and perhaps a small part of this period, were found sufficient to sweep away all vestiges of the Aztec edifices; but had these been even wooden structures of a size at all corresponding to the maani-
up a brisk demand for relies of Aztec civilization which then began to be considered a reality. Picture writings were sought after but none could be found. At last a few were produced and sold at • h prices to foreigners as copies, and the disappearance of the originals was accounted for by Archbishop Zumarraga—the inventor of the miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe—by alleging that be had burned them. If these pictures were not monkish forgeries, then may the Book of Mormon be genuine. Joe Smith had a revelation which led to the discovery of the golden plates of the original book, and after these had been copied they disappeared, and were never seen by any eyes but Joe's.
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