ively recent times they brought the slave ships
from the Guinea coast to our Southern States. The African, like the
Indian, has passed through a most unfavorable environment on his way
from central Asia to America. For ages he was doomed to live in a
climate where high temperature and humidity weed out the active type
of human being. Since activity like that of Europe means death in a
tropical climate, the route by way of Africa has been if anything worse
than by Bering Strait.

By far the most important occurrence which can be laid at the door of
the trade-winds is the bringing of the civilization of Europe and the
Mediterranean to the New World. Twice this may have happened, but
the first occurrence is doubtful and left only a slight impress. For
thousands of years the people around the Mediterranean Sea have been
bold sailors. Before 600 B.C. Pharaoh Necho, so Herodotus says, had
sent Phenician ships on a three-year cruise entirely around Africa. The
Phenicians also sailed by way of Gibraltar to England to bring tin from
Cornwall, and by 500 B.C. the Carthaginians were well acquainted with
the Atlantic coast of northern Africa.

At some time or other, long before the Christian era, a ship belonging
to one of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean was probably blown to
the shores of America by the steady trade-winds. Of course, no one
can say positively that such a voyage occurred. Yet certain curious
similarities between the Old World and the New enable us to infer with a
great deal of probability that it actually happened. The mere fact, for
example, that the adobe houses of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are
strikingly like the houses of northern Africa and Persia is no proof
that the civilization of the Old World and the New are related. A
similar physical environment might readily cause the same type of house
to be evolved in both places. When we find striking similarities
of other kinds, however, the case becomes quite different. The
constellations of the zodiac, for instance, are typified by twelve
living creatures, such as the twins, the bull, the lion, the virgin,
the crab, and the goat. Only one of the constellations, the scorpion,
presents any real resemblance to the animal for which it is named. Yet
the signs of the zodiac in Mediterranean lands and in pre-Columbian
America from Peru to southern Mexico are almost identical. Here is a
list showing the Latin and English names of the constellations and t