ME HUMAN SPECIES. 259 



ally bl ving in the same direction with the currents westward, 

 drive all floating bodies onwards to the coast of the New- 

 World.* What, therefore, the ancients, and more particularly 

 the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, nay, the Celtic may have 

 done, beyond the Atlantic, is not even entirely a conjectural 

 question, since there are still extant elements of a Semitic dia- 

 lect 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 Cortcz was told that he returned to the ea^t; and hence 

 arose that general belief, that beings of a superior nature would 

 again visit the west from their abode beyond the broad ocean, 

 which was fully established in Anahuac.t But, stimulated by 

 the discoveries of the Portuguese, the power and commercial 

 vigilance of Spain successfully blinded for a time the scholastic 

 apathy of the rest of Europe, and persuaded political ignorance 

 that it was Columbus who first made the discovery of America. 

 Thus, every probability supports the opinion, that men from 

 Europe or Western Africa had reached the New World long 

 before the assumed discovery of Columbus ; yet it does not 

 follow that any who were carried to the west by the trade 

 winds ever returned. The Scandinavians, however, reached the 

 coast at a high latitude, where the north-western winds pre- 

 vail in autumn, and the marine current sets towards Europe. 



* See Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, No. 73, October, Jan., 

 1845, where this question is treated more at length, in a notice of the 

 Travels of Prince Maximilian ofWied. 



i 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 Cbolula. There was another legislator priest, named Votan, who 

 arrive! much earlier in Mexico, but then the chronology now admitted 

 must je wrong. See Don Antonio del Rio. Teatro critico Americano, 

 by F. Cabrera. 



