in them satisfactory reasons for
dropping once for all the vexed inquiry, "how America was peopled," and
will smile at its imaginary solutions, whether they suggest Jews,
Japanese, or, as the latest theory is, Egyptians.

While these and other considerations testify forcibly to that isolation
I have already mentioned, they are almost equally positive for an
extensive intercourse in very distant ages between the great families of
the race, and for a prevalent unity of mental type, or perhaps they hint
at a still visible oneness of descent. In their stage of culture, the
maize, cotton, and tobacco could hardly have spread so widely by
commerce alone. Then there are verbal similarities running through wide
families of languages which, in the words of Professor Buschmann, are
"calculated to fill us with bewildering amazement,"[38-1] some of which
will hereafter be pointed out; and lastly, passing to the psychological
constitution of the race, we may quote the words of a sharp-sighted
naturalist, whose monograph on one of its tribes is unsurpassed for
profound reflections: "Not only do all the primitive inhabitants of
America stand on one scale of related culture, but that mental condition
of all in which humanity chiefly mirrors itself, to wit, their religious
and moral consciousness, this source of all other inner and outer
conditions, is one with all, however diverse the natural influences
under which they live."[38-2]

Penetrated with the truth of these views, all artificial divisions into
tropical or temperate, civilized or barbarous, will in the present work,
so far as possible, be avoided, and the race will be studied as a unit,
its religion as the development of ideas common to all its members, and
its myths as the garb thrown around these ideas by imaginations more or
less fertile, but seeking everywhere to embody the same notions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

As the subject of American mythology is a new one to most readers,
and as in its discussion everything depends on a careful selection
of authorities, it is well at the outset to review very briefly
what has already been written upon it, and to assign the relative
amount of weight that in the following pages will be given to the
works most frequently quoted. The conclusions I have arrived at are
so different from those who have previously touched upon the topic
that such a step seems doubly advisable.

The first wh