284 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
seaport, but were overtaken by a storm, in which they 
lost the helm and mast. Till that day their ship had been 
drifting about, a mere butt for the winds and waves, during 
seventeen months; and of thirty-five men only three 
remained, all the others having died of hunger.’” Is it not 
likely that in ancient times such accidents may have occurred 
again and again, and that information of the astronomical 
and chronological systems of eastern Asia may thus have 
been brought to the Nahuatls, who, from the ease with which 
they embraced the religion of the Spaniards, are shown to 
have been open to receive foreign ideas? 
The three arguments on which Humboldt principally relied 
to prove that a communication had existed between the east 
of Asia and the Mexicans may be explained without adopting 
his theory that the Nahuatls had travelled round from the 
the old world. The remarkable resemblance of the Mexican 
and Thibeto-Japanese calendars might result from the 
accidental stranding of a Japanese or Chinese vessel on their 
shores, bringing to them some man learned in the astronomy 
of the old world. The correct orientation of the sides of 
their pyramidal temples was but the result of their great 
astronomical knowledge and of the worship of the sun. 
And the resemblance of their traditions of four epochs of 
destruction and of the dispersion of mankind after a great 
flood of waters, arose from the fact that the great catas- 
trophes that befell the human race at the melting of the ice 
of the glacial period were universal over the world. 
