he action
by the destruction of all their places of worship, because of the
great inroad made by the sea, and the consequent narrowing of the
land. In both instances, we can understand the desire to attain a
great height, in order to have a place of safety if a second flood
were to supervene. Now let me call your attention to a little
coincidence. You observe in the Mexican story that seven giants were
saved. This number seven has always been considered a numeral of great
significance, by all the religionists of olden times. Thus the author
of the book of Genesis so divided the beginning of his narration, that
the creation of the world and all that occurred up to the Flood, is
told in seven chapters. Depending upon legends for his facts about
that period, which the Mexican story says covered forty-eight hundred
years, he condenses it all into the mystic number of seven chapters."

"From all this, then, I am to believe that the story of the Flood is
true in the main? I had always supposed that it was either a myth, or
an exaggeration of some local inundation?"

"Undoubtedly the great Flood occurred. But now I come to the object
which I had in telling you all this. The great pyramids in Mexico, or
_teocali_ as they were called, were temples, places of worship
consecrated to the god Tesculipoca. Would it surprise you to hear that
this Mexican deity is no other than AEsculapius, commonly called the
father of medicine?"

"It would, indeed!"

"Yet it is true. Like many other of the mythological gods of Europe,
he really existed in Mexico. The quickest manner of recognizing him,
is by his name. Let us place the Mexican and the European, one under
the other:

TESCULIPOCA
AESCULAPIUS

"Now, if we remember that the presence of a diphthong in the
transformation of names implies a lost consonant, we see that the
names are virtually the same, the O C A being the Mexican suffix, and
the I U S the Greek. To go a little further in our identification,
mythology informs us that AEsculapius is the son of Apollo. We are also
told that the Tower of Babel was consecrated to Bel, but that the
upper story was devoted to AEsculapius. This is significant, from the
fact that Apollo and Bel are forms of the same deity. Thus we find
that immediately after the Flood, those who escape on one side of the
great Ocean proceed to build a temple to AEsculapius, while on the
other, in the home country, they build a new pyramid, a _teocali_