Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

On the surface, Tylor is narrating a travel moment: the party has reached Mexico’s highlands, and the landscape suddenly becomes legible as history. The line works because it smuggles an argument into a geographical observation. “At last” signals arrival not just in elevation but in significance, as if the lowlands were merely scenery and the highlands the real archive. His phrasing turns settlement into a kind of collective vote: “at least three different races have chosen to settle in,” a Victorian confidence trick that treats complex, coerced histories as rational consumer preference.

That’s the subtext doing most of the work. By framing highland habitation as a “choice” and the lowlands as “fertile” yet “neglected,” Tylor hints at a puzzle that nineteenth-century science loved to solve: why people don’t always live where Europeans think they should. The sentence carries the era’s quiet assumptions about climate, health, and “civilization” - that altitude might correlate with vigor, organization, even moral sturdiness. The “fertile country below” becomes a foil: productive land left unused must mean something about the people, the environment, or both.

Context matters: Tylor is a foundational figure in anthropology, writing when “race” was treated as an explanatory tool and when travel writing doubled as evidence-gathering. The quote isn’t just descriptive; it’s classificatory. Mexico’s terrain is rendered as a laboratory, its populations as data points, and “neglect” as an interpretive verdict that reveals more about Victorian expectations than about indigenous land use or colonial disruption.