Regarding North America then, at the most remote epoch reached by tradition, as already peopled for perhaps hundreds of centuries, I propose in the remaining pages of this volume to record all that is known of aboriginal history down to the period when the native races were found by Europeans living under the institutions and practicing the arts that have been described in the preceding volumes of this work. Comparatively little is known or can ever be known of that history. The sixteenth century is a bluff coast line bounding the dark unnavigable sea of American antiquity. At a very few points along the long line headlands project slightly into the waters, affording a tolerably sure footing for a time, but terminating for the most part in dangerous reefs and quicksands over which the adventurous antiquarian may pass with much risk still farther from the firm land of written record, and gaze at flickering mythical lights attached to buoys beyond. As a rule, nothing whatever is known respecting the history of savage tribes until they come in contact with nations of a higher degree of culture possessing some system of written record. Respecting the past of the Wild Tribes by whom most of our territory was inhabited, we have only a few childish fables of creation, the adventures of some bird or beast divinity, of a flood or some other natural convulsion, a victory or a defeat which may have occurred one or a hundred generations ago. These fables lack chronology, and have no definite historical signification which can be made available. The Civilized Nations, however, had recorded annals not altogether mythical. The Nahua annals reach back chronologically, although not uninterruptedly to about the sixth century of our era; the Maya record is somewhat less extensive in an unbroken line; but both extend more or less vaguely and mythically to the beginning of the Christian era, perhaps much farther. Myths are mingled in great abundance with historical traditions throughout the whole aboriginal period, and it is often utterly impossible to distinguish between them, or to fix the boundary line beyond which the element of history is absolutely wanting. The primitive aboriginal life, not only in America but throughout the world, is wrapped in mystery. The clear light of history fades gradually, as we recede from the present age, into an ever-deepening shadow, which, beyond a varying indefinable point, a border-land of myth and fable, merges into the black night of antiquity. The investigations of modern science move back but slowly this bound between the past and present, and while the results in the aggregate are immense, in shedding new light on portions of the world's annals, progress toward the ultimate end is almost inappreciable. If the human mind shall ever penetrate the mystery, it will be one of its last and most glorious triumphs. America does not differ so much as would at first thought appear from the so-called Old World in respect to the obscurity that shrouds her early history, if both are viewed from a corresponding stand-point--in America the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century, in the eastern continent a remote period when history first began to be recorded in languages still in use. Or if we attach greater importance to Biblical than to other traditions, still America should be compared, not with the nations whose history is traced in the Hebrew record, but with the distant extremities of Asia, Europe, and Africa, on whose history the Bible throws no light, save the statement that they were peopled from a common centre, in which populating movement America has equal claims to be included. To all whose investigations are a search for truth, darkness covers the origin of the American peoples, and their primitive history, save for a few centuries preceding the Conquest. The darkness is lighted up here and there by dim rays of conjecture, which only become fixed lights of fact in the eyes of antiquarians whose lively imagination enables them to see best in the dark, and whose researches are but a sifting-out of supports to a preconceived opinion.