a remote
antiquity," the establishment in America of Phoenician colonies, their
history, and their subsequent extinction. Nor is this the whole story.
In order to strengthen his argument, he gives a new and corrected
version of this tradition. "It told," he writes, "that _pale faces_ had
once before occupied the _hot country_, coming from beyond the _great
water_. _Perhaps_ with this were coupled also tales of suffering and
wrongs; _perhaps_ how cruelly they, the natives, had been forced, by
these hard task-masters, to labor upon the truncated pyramids and their
crowning chapels. With unrequited Indian toil, these men had builded
cities and public works which still preserved their memory, though they
themselves had long since perished, having fulfilled their allotted
centuries. But with their decaying monuments they left a fearful
prophecy, and thus it ran: that _floating houses_ would again return to
the eastern coast, wafted by like winds, and filled with the same race,
to teach the same religion, and to practise the same cruelties, until
they again finished their cycle, and gave place to others, such as the
laws of climate and population might determine." When the reader, after
perusing this extraordinary relation, recovers his breath, he naturally
casts his eye towards the bottom of the page, in the hope of finding
some explanation of it. He accordingly discovers a note, in which Mr.
Wilson states that he has "given a _little different shading_ to the
famous tradition," but that "such, _translated into Indian phraseology_,
would be the popular accounts." Now he had a perfect right to
_interpret_ the tradition as he pleased. He was at liberty to conjecture
that it related to the Phoenicians, as the Spaniards were at liberty to
conjecture that it related to St. Thomas. Of the two interpretations, we
prefer the latter. Mr. Wilson, were he consistent, would have done so
too; for how could the Aztecs, when they saw the Spaniards desecrating
the Phoenician temples and destroying the Phoenician idols, suppose that
these people were of the "same race," and had come "to teach the same
religion"? We care little for his inconsistencies; but the feat which
he has here performed, by his "shadings," his "translations into Indian
phraseology," and his medley of "pale faces," "great waters," "floating
houses," "truncated pyramids," "hard taskmasters," "winds," "climates,"
"religions," and "laws of population," we believe to be unsur