Tylor sailed to North America in 1855, spending a year in the southern United States and then visiting Cuba. Aboard an omnibus in Havana, he met another English traveler who used the familiar Quaker
thou; thus began his friendship with Henry Christy, banker and amateur ethnologist, who invited Tylor's to accompany him on a four-month tour of Mexico. Christy's ethnological interests and Tylor's own observations of Mexican life and customs sowed the seeds of Tylor's interest in anthropology and the "early history of mankind." In 1858 Tylor married; he and his wife, the former Anna Fox, produced no children. By 1862 Tylor had joined the Ethnological Society of London; more important, by the same date he had read Darwin's
On the Origin of Species (1859). Until Christy's death in 1865, Tylor continued to help with the older man's ethnological researches, including work with the French archaeologist Edouard Lartet, excavator of Stone Age sites in the Dordogne Valley.
Tylor's first book, Anahuac: or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861), hovers between colorful travelogue and amateur anthropological study. Tylor's habits of careful observation and sympathetic response to strange mores are intermingled with an ethnocentricism which he was soon partially to shed.
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