ders" in England.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Society in America at the time of the Discovery had reached
stages similar to stages reached by eastern Mediterranean peoples fifty
or sixty centuries earlier.]

Thus, at whatever point we touch the subject of ancient America, we
find scientific opinion tending more and more steadily toward the
conclusion that its people and their culture were indigenous. One of the
most important lessons impressed upon us by a long study of comparative
mythology is that human minds in different parts of the world, but under
the influence of similar circumstances, develop similar ideas and clothe
them in similar forms of expression. It is just the same with political
institutions, with the development of the arts, with social customs,
with culture generally. To repeat the remark already quoted from Sir
John Lubbock,--and it is well worth repeating,--"Different races in
similar stages of development often present more features of resemblance
to one another than the same race does to itself in different stages of
its history." When the zealous Abbe Brasseur found things in the history
of Mexico that reminded him of ancient Egypt, he hastened to the
conclusion that Mexican culture was somehow "derived" from that of
Egypt. It was natural enough for him to do so, but such methods of
explanation are now completely antiquated. Mexican culture was no more
Egyptian culture than a prickly-pear is a lotus. It was an outgrowth of
peculiar American conditions acting upon the aboriginal American mind,
and such of its features as remind us of ancient Egypt or prehistoric
Greece show simply that it was approaching, though it had not reached,
the standard attained in those Old World countries. From this point of
view the resemblances become invested with surpassing interest. Ancient
America, as we have seen, was a much more archaic world than the world
of Europe and Asia, and presented in the time of Columbus forms of
society that on the shores of the Mediterranean had been outgrown before
the city of Rome was built. Hence the intense and peculiar fascination
of American archaeology, and its profound importance to the student of
general history.

CHAPTER II.

PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES.

There is something solemn and impressive in the spectacle of human life
thus going on for countless ages in the Eastern and Western halves of
our planet, each all unknown to the other and