OCEAN, THE UNIVERSAL HIGHWAY 207 



at a very early date, and there it has remained ever 

 siuce. 



This applies to all the early seafarers, and gives 

 almost certainly to the theory that the colonization of 

 parts of the earth by people separated from them 

 by ocea"ns must have been by accident, since their 

 ships were never fitted for undertaking lengthy 

 voyages, and, indeed, were usually of such a low grade 

 of seaworthiness, or so small, that it needed no little 

 courage on the part of the seafarers to creep in them 

 from headland to headland, or cross narrow stretches of 

 sea without losing sight of land. But, in the nature 

 of things, such frail and hardly navigable craft must 

 now and then have been blown off the land and carried 

 away by wind and current for long distances, some- 

 times reaching far-distant shores with some at least of 

 the crew or passengers still alive. 



There is only one exception to this rule, one 

 difficulty in applying it universally, and that is the 

 almost absolute certainty that parts of America were 

 colonized by the early Egyptians. The records they 

 have left behind them, in the shape of buildings 

 covered by inscriptions which are almost identical with 

 those recently discovered in Egypt, antedating the 

 pyramids by a few thousands of years, are all on the 

 western side of the continent, showing that these 

 highly cultured visitors came from the East. But 

 since there is a sharply defined limit to human en- 

 durance, which would be reached in a case of drifting 

 many months before the vast stretches of ocean be- 

 tween the eastern shores of Africa and the west coast 

 of America had been crossed, we must admit that 

 there is good ground for supposing that these old 



