Pivot of Civilization

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Sider right and sane to-day. The extraordi nary neolithic civilizations of the American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans, seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest parallels to-day in the art and writ ings of certain types of lunatic. There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums extraordinarily parallel in their Spirit and quality with the Maya inscrip tions of Central America. Yet these neolithic e American societies got along for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. They respected seed-time and harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and terrible order. And they produced quite beautiful works Of art. Yet their surplus of population was dis e. Posed of by an organization of sacrificial Slaughter unparalleled in the records of man kind.' Many of the institutions that seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled the invading Europeans with perplexity and hor ror.