three years, but was to lead me out of my original field of research, into
distant, and to me, hitherto untrodden realms, in close pursuit of facts
relating to the oldest forms of religion, social organization, and
symbolism.

The first portion of the present publication was planned as a short
monograph of forty-one pages, treating of the origin of the native
swastika or cross symbols, and was written in July, 1898, its outcome
being the unforeseen conclusion that the cosmical conceptions of the
ancient Mexicans were identical with those of the Zunis. I next traced the
same fundamental set of ideas in Yucatan, Central America and Peru and
formed the wish to add this investigation to the preceding. The result has
been the portion of the work extending from page 41, paragraph 2, to page
284, which was printed in 1899.

Having once launched into a course of comparative research, the deep
interest I have always taken in the question of Asiatic contact led me to
carry my investigation of the same subject into China. It then seemed
impossible not to extend researches from Eastern to Western Asia, and from
Asia Minor to Egypt, Greece, Rome and Western Europe. It is in this
unpremeditated way that the scope of the present investigation enlarged
itself of its own accord, for the simple reason that the most interesting
and precious facts fell into my way as I advanced and all I had to do was
to pick them up and add them to my collection of evidence.

One serious disadvantage, arising from the circumstance that the present
investigation has been in press for nearly three years, is my inability to
make any alteration, amendment, or addition, in the earlier portions,
which stand as written at different times. It is a matter of regret to me
that I was not acquainted with O'Neil's "Night of the Gods" and Hewitt's
"Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times," at an earlier stage of my
investigation, as through them my publication would have been enriched by
many valuable additions which I could have incorporated in the body of my
work without unduly sacrificing its unity of form.

In the line of Maya investigation notable advances have been made since I
wrote (on page 221), about the "septenary set of signs" described by Mr.
A. P. Maudslay in 1886, and about the inscription on the tablet of the
Temple of the Cross at Palenque (pp. 237-39). Since that time an important
publication on the Tablet of the Cross, to which I should have liked to