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To such a land to such a mystery sailed forth Jacques Cartier, discoverer of Canada. The Icelandic sagas contain legends of a discovery of America before Columbus. Benjamin de Costa, in his 'Pre-Columbian Discovery of America', has given translations of a number of these legends.
An understanding of this distinction not only explains many things in the present condition of Latin America but also in the history of pre-Columbian Central America. Forests, as we have seen, require that the ground be moist throughout practically the whole of the season that is warm enough for growth.
As I have pointed out in my discussion of this matter in my Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America, the plateau at the top of this range of terraces easily might have been laid off in a true semicircle by the simple means of a pointed stick at the end of a long rope; and from the true line thus established the line of the terrace below it could have been had and so on down to the lowest terrace of all.
By those who first heard these stories they were supposed, with naive Euhemerism, to refer to pre-Columbian visits of Europeans to this continent, like that of the Northmen in the tenth century. But a scientific study of the subject has dissipated such notions.
As I raised the bag, that I might replace in it the refolded paper which I already saw heralded to the world as the Codex Palgravius, and reproduced in fac-simile in Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America some glittering object dropped out of it and fell with a jingling sound upon the stone floor.
Palaeolithic man did his usual sporting sketches on shells, and there was a vast and varied art of designing on shells among the pre-Columbian natives of North America. We here see the most primitive scratches developing into full-blown Aztec art. If the markings were only on such inscribed shells as mouldered away so Mr. No modern could make the designs on shells that were hurrying into dust.
True dreamers of all ages have, for metaphysical reasons, imagined the existence of intangible fluids in space they had, indeed, peopled space several times over with different kinds of ethers, as Maxwell remarks but such vague dreamings no more constituted the discovery of the modern ether than the dream of some pre-Columbian visionary that land might lie beyond the unknown waters constituted the discovery of America.
Yet the signs of the zodiac in Mediterranean lands and in pre-Columbian America from Peru to southern Mexico are almost identical. Here is a list showing the Latin and English names of the constellations and their equivalents in the calendars of the Peruvians, Mexicans, and Mayas. *
Reasons which are thought well-nigh conclusive have already been presented for believing that the people of this tribe were mound- builders, and that they had migrated in pre-Columbian times from some point north of the locality in which they were encountered by Europeans.
I found that all the relaters of this lore were positive as to the antiquity of the narratives, and distinguished accurately between what was or was not pre-Columbian. In fact, I came in time to the opinion that the original stock of all the Algonquin myths, and perhaps of many more, still existed, not far away in the West, but at our very doors; that is to say, in Maine and New Brunswick.
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