America. Even the casual reader will be impressed by the close general parallelism between the two halves of the world, and, it is this obvious fact more than anything else, that has stimulated speculative writings upon the subject. Repeated efforts have been made to show that all the higher culture complexes of the New World were brought over from the Old, particularly from China or the Pacific Islands. Most of these writings are merely speculative and may be ignored, but some of the facts we have cited for correspondences to Pacific Island culture have not been satisfactorily explained. Dixon[1] has carefully reviewed this subject, asserting in general that among such traits as blowguns, plank canoes, hammocks, lime chewing, head-hunting cults, the man's house, and certain masked dances common to the New World and the Pacific Islands, there appears the tendency to mass upon the Pacific side of the New World. This gives these traits a semblance of continuous distribution with the Island culture. Yet it should be noted that these traits, as enumerated above, have in reality a sporadic distribution in the New World and that there are exceptions. On the other hand, there is no great a priori improbability that some of these traits did reach the New World from the Pacific Islands. Satisfactory proof of such may yet be attained, but such discoveries would not account for New World culture as a whole. Then there is abundant data to show that the Polynesians are recent arrivals in the Pacific;[2] in fact, Maya culture must have been in its dotage long before they were within striking distance of the American coast.
In the preceding discussions, we found evidences of a certain unity in the fundamentals of culture for all parts of the New World, and unless we find among these some fundamentals that are also conspicuous in the Old World, we need look no farther than the New for their place of origin. The Old World also has its fundamental traits, particularly the ancient cultures of Asia, but so far, few close parallels between these and those of the New have come to light. Again, the originality of many New World traits is apparent when our subject is viewed from the cultural horizon of the Old World. It has
