through the Buddhists of Asia, but were derived from an actual knowledge
of Atlantis possessed by the people of America.

Atlantis and the western continent had from an immemorial age held
intercourse with each other: the great nations of America were simply
colonies from Atlantis, sharing in its civilization, language, religion,
and blood. From Mexico to the peninsula of Yucatan, from the shores of
Brazil to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, from the Gulf of Mexico to
the head-waters of the Mississippi River, the colonies of Atlantis
extended; and therefore it is not strange to find, as Alfred Maury says,
American traditions of the Deluge coming nearer to that of the Bible and
the Chaldean record than those of any people of the Old World.

"The most important among the American traditions are the Mexican, for
they appear to have been definitively fixed by symbolic and mnemonic
paintings before any contact with Europeans. According to these
documents, the Noah of the Mexican cataclysm was Coxcox, called by
certain peoples Teocipactli or Tezpi. He had saved himself, together
with his wife Xochiquetzal, in a bark, or, according to other
traditions, on a raft made of cypress-wood (Cupressus disticha).
Paintings retracing the deluge of Coxcox have been discovered among the
Aztecs, Miztecs, Zapotecs, Tlascaltecs, and Mechoacaneses. The tradition
of the latter is still more strikingly in conformity with the story as
we have it in Genesis, and in Chaldean sources. It tells how Tezpi
embarked in a spacious vessel with his wife, his children, and several
animals, and grain, whose preservation was essential to the subsistence
of the human race. When the great god Tezcatlipoca decreed that the
waters should retire, Tezpi sent a vulture from the bark. The bird,
feeding on the carcasses with which the earth was laden, did not return.
Tezpi sent out other birds, of which the humming-bird only came back