of ancient North America.

The mass of evidence which has been accumulated by scholars illustrative
of a common origin of mythologies and a centralization of them around
the serpent; or, as G.S. Faber will have it, the Ark; or, as some think,
the heavenly bodies; or, as others claim, simply a worship of paternity
and maternity,--is immense. Why they should claim separate precedence
for symbols, all of which set forth the one great mystery how GOD
'weaves and works in action's storm,' is only explicable on the ground
that 'every scholar likes to have his own private little pet
hypothesis.' Enough, however, may be found to show that this stupendous
nature-worship _was_ held the world over,--_possibly_ in the days of a
single language,--in America as in ancient Italy, or around the sacred
mountain-crags of India; in Lebanon as in Ireland, in the garden-lands
of Assyria, and in the isles of the South.

Yet all this is as yet, for the truly scientific ethnologist, only
half-fact, indefinite, belonging to the cloud-land of fable. The poet or
the thinker, yearning for a new basis of art, may find in the immense
mass of legends and symbols an identification between all the forms of
nature in a vast harmony and mutual reflection of every beautiful
object; but for the man of facts it is unformed, not arranged, useless.
We know not the color of the race or races which piled the Western
mounds; their languages are lost; they are vague mist-gods, living in a
dimmer medium than that of mere tradition. So ends the first period of
intercommunication between Asia--the probable birthplace of the old
mythology--and America.


II. THE CHINESE DISCOVERERS OF MEXICO IN THE FIFTH CENTURY.