philosophers, who devised cycles produced by
different combinations of numbers and signs, the object being to regulate
time and communal life in imitation of the law, order and harmony existing
in the motion of the stars and under the guidance of a supreme ruler, the
earthly representative of Polaris.

The origin of these ideas and governmental scheme, in the Old World, is
assigned by competent authorities to a northern race which had discovered
the art of fire-making and evolved a religious cult and ritual suggested
by it, in association with pole-star worship. Their civilization is
supposed to have been developed by contact with a southern race, in
Phrygia, and to have been carried at a remote period by their seafaring
descendants to India, Asia Minor, Egypt and beyond the pillars of
Hercules, to European countries, situated on the Atlantic.

The present investigation brings into prominence the fact that, just as
the older Andean art closely resembles that of the early Mediterranean, an
observation first made by Prof. F. W. Putnam,(159) so the fundamental
principles, numerical scheme and plan of the state founded by the foreign
Incas in Peru, resembled those formulated by Plato in his description of
an ideal state.

It is a remarkable fact, on which the writer lays utmost stress, that,
whereas there is a marked difference between the Chinese and the Mexican
and Peruvian divisions of the elements and numerical cycles, the American
systems exactly agree with those propounded by Greek philosophers and said
to have reached them from more ancient centres of culture, presumably
through the Phoenicians. On the other hand, there undoubtedly exist
remarkable analogies between the Chinese and Hindu and Mexican
sociological, chronological, cyclical systems, their principles being
precisely the same. These close analogies as well as the marked
divergences which have been noted can only be satisfactorily accounted for
by the assumption that each of these countries derived their civilization
from the same source. Over and over again different writers have pointed
out undeniable analogies and resemblances between the highest forms of
American civilization and that of China, India, Asia Minor, the
Mediterranean and Western European countries. At the same time modern
research has shown that the seafarers, whom we shall conveniently
designate as the Phoenicians, acted as the intermediaries of ancient Old
World civilization and formu