call his love "fairest among women," and to
prophecy a Messiah "fairer than the children of men," fulfilled in that
day when He appeared "in garments so white as no fuller on earth could
white them." No nation is free from the power of this law. "White,"
observes Adair of the southern Indians, "is their fixed emblem of peace,
friendship, happiness, prosperity, purity, and holiness."[175-1] Their
priests dressed in white robes, as did those of Peru and Mexico; the
kings of the various species of animals were all supposed to be
white;[175-2] the cities of refuge established as asylums for alleged
criminals by the Cherokees in the manner of the Israelites were called
"white towns," and for sacrifices animals of this color were ever most
highly esteemed. All these sentiments were linked to the dawn. Language
itself is proof of it. Many Algonkin words for east, morning, dawn, day,
light, as we have already seen, are derived from a radical signifying
_white_. Or we can take a tongue nowise related, the Quiche, and find
its words for east, dawn, morning, light, bright, glorious, happy,
noble, all derived from _zak_, white. We read in their legends of the
earliest men that they were "white children," "white sons," leading "a
white life beyond the dawn," and the creation itself is attributed to
the Dawn, the White One, the White Sacrificer of Blood.[175-3] But why
insist upon the point when in European tongues we find the daybreak
called _l'aube_, _alva_, from _albus_, white? Enough for the purpose if
the error of those is manifest, who, in such expressions, would seek
support for any theory of ancient European immigration; enough if it
displays the true meaning of those traditions of the advent of
benevolent visitors of fair complexion in ante-Columbian times, which
both Algonkins and Iroquois[176-1] had in common with many other tribes
of the western continent. Their explanation will not be found in the
annals of Japan, the triads of the Cymric bards, nor the sagas of
Icelandic skalds, but in the propensity of the human mind to attribute
its own origin and culture to that white-shining orient where sun, moon,
and stars, are daily born in renovated glory, to that fair mother, who,
at the cost of her own life, gives light and joy to the world, to the
brilliant womb of Aurora, the glowing bosom of the Dawn.

Even the complicated mythology of Peru yields to the judicious
application of these principles of interpretation. Its pecul