Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. ( 1 9 1 5 ), No. 10 1 2 1 



So also in the case of circumcision, tattooing, and 

 almost every one of the curious customs I have enumer- 

 ated in the foregoing account. Then, again, all the 

 characteristic stories of the creation, the deluge, the 

 petrifaction of human beings and of spirits dwelling in 

 rocks, and of the origin of the chosen people from an 

 incestuous union make their appearance in Mexico, Peru 

 and elsewhere. 



The peculiar Swastika symbol, associated with the 

 u heliolithic" cult by pure chance in the place of its origin, 

 which the people of Timor, in Indonesia, regard as the 

 ancient emblem of fire, the Son of the Sun, also appears 

 in America. 



Even so bizarre a practice as the artificial deformation 

 of the head (48, pp. 515 to 519), which seems to have 

 originated in Armenia, became added to the repertoire 

 of the fantastic collection of tricks of the " heliolithic " 

 wanderers, and was adopted sporadically by numerous 

 isolated groups of people along the great migration route. 

 For some reason this strange idea " caught on " in America 

 to a greater extent than elsewhere and spread far and 

 wide throughout the greater part of the continent. 



Many other curious customs might be cited as straws 

 that indicate clearly which way the stream of culture has 

 flowed. For instance Keane (42, p. 264) states that " like 

 the Burmese the Nicobarese place a piece of money in 

 the mouth of a corpse before burial to help it in the other 

 world"; and Hutchinson (38, p. 448) supplies the link 

 across the Pacific : — " Men, women and children [in 

 ancient Peru] had frequently a bit of copper between the 

 teeth, like the obolus which the pagan Romans used to 

 place in the mouth to pay ferry to the boatman Charon 

 for passage across the Styx." 



This reference to Charon reminds us also of the wide- 



