236 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



Andrea Bianca, bearing date 1436, still in the library of 

 St. Marc at Venice. Columbus himself found the rudder 

 of a ship cast on the beach at Guadaloupe. This would 

 be a natural consequence of any ship being disabled, and 

 driven to the south-west, till it falls in with the trade 

 winds, which, perpetually blowing in the same direction 

 with the currents westward, drive all floating bodies 

 onwards to the coast of the New World.* What, there- 

 fore the ancients, and more particularly the Phoenicians 

 and Carthaginians, nay, the Celtae may have done, be- 

 yond the Atlantic, is not even entirely a conjectural 

 question, since there are still extant elements of a 

 Semitic dialect in certain tribes of South America, 

 and of Celtic in the north ; and without the arrival of 

 some mariners from the coasts of the Old Continent, 

 the legend of Quelsalcoatle, a Toltecan legislator, with 

 Budhistic, perhaps Christian dogmas, could not have 

 been framed prior to the arrival of the Spaniard ; yet 

 Cortez was told that he returned to the east ; and hence 

 arose that general belief, that beings of a superior na- 

 ture would again visit the west from their abode beyond 

 the broad ocean, was fully established in Anahuac.t 



* See Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, No. 75, 

 October, Jan. 1845, where this question is treated more at 

 length, in a notice of the Travels of Prince Maximilian of 

 Wied. 



t If the painted chronology of the Mexicans could be 

 relied on, the legislator priest came with the Toltecs to the 

 plateau of Anahuac, which would then be in A.D. 648. It 

 was asserted, that he began the pyramid of Cholula. There 

 was another legislator priest, named Votan, who arrived 



