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DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



This original publication of De Guignes was violently attacked and 

 criticised by Klaproth, yet it was again reafifirmed by Prof. Carl Neu- 

 mann, professor of oriental languages at Munich, and again by Mr. 

 Gustave d'Eichthal was defended and vindicated. I will not follow this 

 question any further than to add that the confimation of this fact inas- 

 much as it relates to Buddhist writings and remains, has not heretofore 

 been proved; yet Buddhist images, or at least many strikingly resem- 

 bling them, have been found in Old Mexico and Central America. 



Last fall I had the great pleasure of perusing Schliemann's "Ilios, " 

 published by Harpers in New York, and was wonderfully pleased with 

 that singularly attractive work on ancient Troy, as revealed to him by 

 his several years' labor on the hill of Hissarlik near the ancient 

 Scamander. Nothing, however, pleased me so much as the extraordin- 

 ary similitude between the ancient flint and stone weapons and the 

 pottery of the lowest pre-historical cities unearthed by Dr. Schlie- 

 mann and those we have both found and seen not only in the val- 

 ley of the great Father of Waters which eddies by your beautiful 

 town, but also in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. While 

 comparing the forms of jiottery well delineated in the illustrated cata- 

 logue of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1881, drawn by Mr. W. H. 

 Holmes, I was struck by the resemblance between Fig. 140 of the 

 Ethnological Collection, pages 466-67, and the Buddhist signs of which 



FtiT, 



Fi. 



the Sanscrit name of Fig. i is "svastika," a sign of good luck, meaning 

 "to be well," being No. i of the sixty-five auspicious signs of the foot- 

 prints of the Hindoo God Buddha; while No. 2 represents a reversal 

 of Fig. I, the svastika, and ranks as the fourth sign of Buddha, and is 

 called in Sanscrit "sauvastika." Dr. Schliemann is inclined to con- 

 sider these figures, from the communication upon them from Max 

 Mueller to him, as representing the vernal and autumnal sun. At all 

 events, they were universally considered to be signs of good augury. 

 Emile Burnouf thinks that these two signs represent the two pieces of 

 wood which were laid crosswise before the altars to produce the sacred 

 fire called "Ague," the ends of which were bent "at right angles and 



