now comparatively little wheat or barley is raised in Central America, Mexico, or Peru, and none on the low coasts of those countries; while a smaller quantity of maize, proportionately, is grown in Italy, Spain, and the rest of Western Europe, the rainy climate being unsuited to it.  We have seen (p. 60, ante) that there is reason to believe that maize was known in a remote period in the drier regions of the Egyptians and Chinese.

As science has been able to reconstruct the history of the migrations of the Aryan race, by the words that exist or fail to appear in the kindred branches of that tongue, so the time will come when a careful comparison of words, customs, opinions, arts existing on the opposite sides of the Atlantic will furnish an approximate sketch of Atlantean history.

The people had attained a high position as agriculturists.  The presence of the plough in Egypt and Peru implies that they possessed that implement.  And as the horns and ox-head of Baal show the esteem in which cattle were held among them, we may suppose that they had passed the stage in which the plough was drawn by men, as in Peru and Egypt in ancient times, and in Sweden during the Historical Period, and that it was drawn by oxen or horses.  They first domesticated the horse, hence the association of Poseidon or Neptune, a sea-god, with horses; hence the race-courses for horses described by Plato.  They possessed sheep, and manufactured woollen goods; they also had goats, dogs, and swine.  They raised cotton and made cotton goods; they probably cultivated maize, wheat, oats, barley, rye, tobacco, hemp, and flax, and possibly potatoes; they built aqueducts and practised irrigation; they were architects, sculptors, and engravers; they possessed an alphabet; they worked in tin, copper, bronze, silver, gold, and iron.

During the vast period of their duration, as peace and agriculture caused their population to increase to overflowing, they spread out in colonies east and west to the ends of the earth.  This was not the work of a few years, but of many centuries; and the relations between these colonies may have been something like the relation between the different colonies that in a later age were established by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans; there was an intermingling with the more ancient races, the autochthones of the different lands where they settled; and the same crossing of stocks, which we know to have been continued all through the Historical Period, must have been going on for thousands of years, whereby new races and new dialects were formed; and the result of all this has been that the smaller races of antiquity have grown larger, while all the complexions shade into each other, so that we can pass from the whitest to the darkest by insensible degrees.