315 
to the usual characteristics of all other North American tribes. That would 
show how, if anything could show it, a peculiarity or difference might arise 
in a single tribe ; and it also shows that the fact of a shipwreck, such as that 
mentioned in the paper of the Japanese shipwreck, was not an isolated case 
in America, but the tribes may have been told by those people, “ We come 
from a superior source of civilization.” The same thing exists in the Mexican 
tradition that men and women, children of the sun, came among them at 
some remote time, and they attributed their higher degree of civilization to 
the civilization that was introduced among them by the people. The Peru- 
vians also had a tradition of that kind, all of which, in my opinion, tends to 
prove the hypothesis contended for in the paper. Perhaps the best way in 
which to test the accuracy of the paper would be to try it on the other 
hypothesis, how could such an accumulation of arbitrary things exist among 
the inhabitants of all these countries without supposing them to have had a 
common origin ? 
Mr. Warington. — I wish just to call attention to one item of Mexican 
tradition which seems to have been overlooked by the learned author of 
the paper. I cannot remember the exact details, but I can only give him 
the source from which I learnt it, which is Tylor’s Researches into the 
Early History of Mankind. In that book the author mentions a Mexi- 
can tradition which points to some part of the Mexican race having once 
inhabited the Arctic regions. If so, that is a very important element 
in the idea of America having been peopled through Behring’s Straits. As 
that idea has been so fully referred to in the course of the discussion, 
and as Mr. Titcomb seems to have thought somewhat slightingly of it, I 
think it right to draw attention to this fact which is stated in Mr. 
Tylor’s book. 
Rev. J. H. Titcomb. — I will not detain you at any great length in reply. I 
will only say, in regard to one or two remarks about the things which I have 
omitted, that if I had not omitted many things in my paper I should have 
been talking now. I am not unaware of the tradition referred to in Mr. 
Tylor’s book, and, in point of fact, if you refer to the footnote at the bottom 
of page 11 of the printed paper,* you will see that I have made a reference to 
Mr. Tylor’s book ; indeed some of the customs I have mentioned I have 
taken very much from that book. Mr. Shaw, in the remarks he has been 
good enough to favour us with, has spoken of the improbability of any 
persons who were sailing in boats being driven by the force of the currents or 
winds over to America, and their having peopled it, because it was not likely 
that they would have their wives in their boats with them. That is one 
aspect of the question ; but on the theory that persons who were in boats on 
an excursion might have been blown off the land, or been caught in one of 
the currents to which I have alluded, such an idea might become possible. 
When I told you that it was discovered some time since that one of the 
headlands in the Hawaiian group had a name attached to it by the natives 
which signified the starting-place for Tahiti, that seemed to indicate that 
* Ante, p. 294. 
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