Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

The sentence is doing more than setting a calendar and an itinerary; it’s staking a claim to legitimacy. Tylor opens by anchoring his narrative to logistics: months named, a year specified, a mode of travel declared. That checklist rhythm is a quiet performance of scientific credibility in an era when “travel writing” could mean anything from hard-won observation to barroom fantasia. By tying “narrative and remarks” to a defined span of time and the physical constraint of horseback travel, he implies a controlled dataset: I was there, I moved at a human pace, I saw what could be seen on the ground.

The subtext is also about method. “Originated” suggests the book is a product of firsthand contact rather than secondhand rumor. It reads like an early gesture toward fieldwork, years before anthropology would formalize participant observation. The phrase “for the most part on horseback” matters because it signals proximity to rural Mexico, not just urban salons or diplomatic corridors. It hints at dust, fatigue, and the slow accumulation of detail, which the reader is invited to treat as authenticity.

Context sharpens the stakes. 1856 sits amid Mexico’s post-independence turbulence and the Reform era, with foreign travelers often framing the country as both picturesque and politically unstable. Tylor’s careful dating also places him close to the U.S.-Mexico War’s aftermath, when Anglo observers carried assumptions about “civilization” and progress. His neutral, procedural tone is the point: it masks the power of the traveler’s gaze while asking to be trusted as plain fact. The opening quietly converts movement through another nation into authority over it.