and through them all a startling identity: everywhere the Serpent,
everywhere the Queen of Heaven with her child, everywhere the cup of
life and the bread and honey of the mysteries, with the salt of the
orgie, everywhere a thousand fibres twining and trailing into each other
in bewildering confusion, indicating a common origin, yet puzzling
beyond all hope those who seek to find it. So vast is the wealth of
material which opens on the scholar who seeks to investigate this common
origin of mythologies, and with them the possible early identity of
races and of languages, that he is almost certain to soon bury himself
in a hypothesis and become lost in some blind alley of the great
labyrinth.

Certain points appear to have once existed in common to nations on every
part of the earth previous to authentic history, and in these America
had probably more or less her share, as appears from certain monuments
and relics of her early races. They are as follows:--

1. A worship of nature, based on the inscrutable mystery of generation
with birth and death. As these two extremes caused each other, they were
continually _identified_ in the religious myth or symbol employed to
represent either.

2. This great principle of action, developing itself into birth and
death, was regarded as being symbolized in every natural object, and
corresponding with these there were created myths, or 'stories,' setting
forth the principal mystery of nature in a thousand poetic forms.

3. The formula according to which all myths were shaped was that of
transition, or _the passing through_. The germ, in the mother or in the
plant, which after its sleep reappeared in life, was also recognized in