in connection
with the sunken continent of Atlantis, that Ouranos, one of the
Atlantean kings, ordered his whole army to be circumcised that they
might escape a fatal scourge then decimating the people to their
westward.[3] This tradition tells us that the hygienic benefits of
circumcision were recognized antediluvian facts, as it also points out
the way by which circumcision traveled westward across to the Western
World. As Donnelly has pointed out, many of the Americans possessed not
only traditions, habits, and customs that must have come from the Old
World, but the similarity of many words and their meaning that exists
between some of the American languages and those of the indigenous
inhabitants that have still their remains in spots on the southwestern
shores of Europe--the ancient Armorica whose colony in Wales still
retains its ancient words--leaves no room for doubt that at one time a
landed highway existed between the two worlds. The Mandans, on the Upper
Missouri, have many words of undoubted Armorican origin in their
vocabulary,[4] just as the Chiapenec, of Central America, contains its
principal words denotive of deity, family relations, and many conditions
of life that are identically the same as in the Hebrew,[5] the name of
father, son, daughter, God, king, and rich being essentially the same in
the two languages. It must have been more than a passing coincidence
that gives the Mandans some of their most expressive words from the
Welsh, or that gave to Central America many cities bearing analogous
names with the cities of Armenia.[6] Canadian names of localities, as
well as those of the Mississippi Valley, denote the French origin of
their pioneers, as well as the names of Upper California denote the
nationality and creed of its first settlers. So that there is nothing
strange in asserting that American civilization and many of the customs
as found in the fifteenth century by the early Spanish discoverers were
nothing more than the remains of ancient and modified Phoenician
civilization, among which figured circumcision.

Dr. A. B. Arnold, of Baltimore, argues that, with the present state of
our anthropological knowledge and the material that research has been
able to furnish, we need no longer be surprised to find customs, laws,
and morals, among nations living in regions of the world widely apart
from each other, which betray an identity of origin and development, and
that beliefs and institutions, wh