and various kinds of birds were sacrificed. The Mexican priests,
named papas, wore long hair, practised asceticism, gashed their
breasts, arms and legs and pierced their ears and tongues. On the
Palenque bas-reliefs, priests with long hair are sculptured. The
human sacrifices of Mexico and those of Egypt, Phoenicia and
Assyria, described by Sayce and Hewitt (pp. 275 and 348), are
closely alike. See also Hewitt's account of the blood brotherhood
made between the sacrificer and the land on which the blood is
poured (p. 196), and the Chichimec blood sacrifice described in
the present work, p. 66.

The foregoing are a few noteworthy analogies which have impressed
themselves upon me during the present course of investigation, in addition
to the many undeniable and unsuspected evidences I have found, of an
identity of star-cult, ritual and social organization in Old and New World
civilizations.

It will be seen that the outcome of my researches corroborates the
opinions differently expressed by a long line of eminent investigators,
who have been constantly discovering and pointing out undeniable
similarities and identities between the civilizations of both hemispheres.

It seems to me that an accumulation of evidence now forces us to face and
thoroughly investigate the possibility that, from remote antiquity, our
continent and its inhabitants were known to the seafarers of the Old
World, to whose agency the spread of similar forms of cult and
civilization in the New World is to be assigned.

While those who uphold the autochthony of the native civilization may
regard such identities as accidental, those who are willing to admit the
possibility that the Phoenicians, the red men of antiquity, whose land was
Syria, navigating by the pole-star, may have reached America, will
doubtlessly dwell upon the unquestionable fact that the most ancient
traces of organized and settled communities actually exist along the coast
swept by the equatorial currents. A glance at an ordinary chart exhibiting
the ocean currents and trade winds shows that vessels sailing southward
from the Canary Islands and caught in the north African current, might, at
a certain point, enter the north equatorial current flowing towards the
coast of America. Further southward still, off the coast of Guinea, the
current bearing this name meets the main equatorial current which sweeps
along the coast of Honduras and Yucatan