the outcome of two lines of study pursued, with more
or less interruption from other studies, for about thirty years. It will
be observed that the book has two themes, as different in character as
the themes for voice and piano in Schubert's "Fruehlingsglaube," and yet
so closely related that the one is needful for an adequate comprehension
of the other. In order to view in their true perspective the series of
events comprised in the Discovery of America, one needs to form a mental
picture of that strange world of savagery and barbarism to which
civilized Europeans were for the first time introduced in the course of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their voyages along the
African coast, into the Indian and Pacific oceans, and across the
Atlantic. Nothing that Europeans discovered during that stirring period
was so remarkable as these antique phases of human society, the mere
existence of which had scarcely been suspected, and the real character
of which it has been left for the present generation to begin to
understand. Nowhere was this ancient society so full of instructive
lessons as in aboriginal America, which had pursued its own course of
development, cut off and isolated from the Old World, for probably more
than fifty thousand years. The imperishable interest of those episodes
in the Discovery of America known as the conquests of Mexico and Peru
consists chiefly in the glimpses they afford us of this primitive world.
It was not an uninhabited continent that the Spaniards found, and in
order to comprehend the course of events it is necessary to know
something about those social features that formed a large part of the
burden of the letters of Columbus and Vespucius, and excited even more
intense and general interest in Europe than the purely geographical
questions suggested by the voyages of those great sailors. The
descriptions of ancient America, therefore, which form a kind of
background to the present work, need no apology.

It was the study of prehistoric Europe and of early Aryan institutions
that led me by a natural sequence to the study of aboriginal America. In
1869, after sketching the plan of a book on our Aryan forefathers, I was
turned aside for five years by writing "Cosmic Philosophy." During that
interval I also wrote "Myths and Myth-Makers" as a side-work to the
projected book on the Aryans, and as soon as the excursion into the
field of general philosophy was ended, in 1874, the work on t