there can be little doubt that the true answer is, By the way of Behring's Straits. Mr. Short critically examines all the theories, especially the indigenous theory, and leaves this a well-settled question. As to the question of the time of their occupancy of American soil, beyond a few centuries it is all a matter of sheer guess. The trees growing on the mounds are some six hundred years old. Let us then give the Red Indian six hundred years and the Mound Builder six hundred more, and fling in six or seven hundred more ex gratia, and we arrive at the Christian era. Fling in a thousand or two years more, and we arrive at the time of Abraham. Sir John Lubbock limits his demand to three thousand years for the whole, and that is quite as much as any known data justify. American chronology, has, therefore, no significance for the biblicist.

Our paleontological friends have had hard grubbing in American soil. From the Floridian jawbone down to Dr. Abbott's drift flints in New Jersey, the geological man turns up a phantasm. They just get finger on his tail, and lo! non est. And even had they caught him, how would they show any historical connection between him and any living race? Scientists should not guess. Boasting of their grounds of certainty, they must give us demonstration, not conjecture nor prophecy. Dr. Dawson, in his "Archaia," twenty years ago stated the probability that anthropoids might be exhumed from the depths of our American soil; but anthropoids are not, of course, men. The fox-sized predecessor of our horse was not a horse. Far less are anthropoid apes real men. Man is not only body and life and intellect; he is also spirit. The power to chip a flint does not prove a man. But, as an eloquent negro bishop once said, "Whoever can lift his hands to heaven and say 'Our Father' is a man." The Adamic man was not only developed from the "dust" below, but endued with the divine "breath" from above, and no development from below, no genetic descent, could have made him an immortal man without the endowment from above. anthropoids described by General Thomas as exhumed near the line of the North Pacific Railroad, with their receding frontals and long dog-like, or bird-like, aquiline snouts, may have been predecessors of man, genetic or typical, without being man. There may be missing logical links, as well as missing generative links, in the process of proving pre-Adamic man.

The

Our southward advance into the isthmus brings us to a region where archæology rises into something like a glimmer of history.

Chiapa, Guatemala, and Honduras were the home of the ancient Maya race, whose architecture, especially at the ancient capital, Palenque, inspires us with wonder. We are also told, with solemn face, that its antiquity is "very remote;" that its growth is plainly "indigenous," and that traces of "development" are very evident. But its proofs of antiquity are not very frightful. Several very splendid architectures have come into existence and "developed" to perfection in Europe since the Christian era. Christianity created several new forms and styles. There is the Byzantine, which took its rise in Constantinople and attained perfection in the Church of St. Sophia. The Gothic arose some seven hundred years ago, and came to perfection in less than three centuries. The Saracenic sprang from the Byzantine, and produced the Alhambra in Spain. What proof that Palenque is older than Solomon's temple, or Herod's temple reconstruction, or than Diocletian's palace, or than the Moorish Alhambra? Whatever evidences of pre-Adamic, or pre-Mosaic, or pre-Christian antiquity the Maya civilization may present, we do not find them in the architectural remains.

The traditional testimony of the Mayas affirms that they are not an indigenous race, but that they came, as more usually said, from beyond sea and from the East. Mr. Short amply shows how they may have immigrated from the other hemisphere either by an eastern or western route. Especially interesting is his treatment of the Atlantis tradition. Plato tells us that the Egyptian priests declared that there was once a great island on the western coast of Africa connecting with a great western continent, which was submerged in the sea. A similar tradition exists among the Mayas. These concurrent traditions (as we infer) are quite a demonstration, not only of the fact of the submersion, but that the fact took place, partially at least, within the reach of human recollection. Strange to say, the modern sea-depth ex plorations have confirmed the truth of the tradition. A high submarine plateau runs from the north coast of Africa to America. But, apart from this lost natural bridge, the concurrent trade-winds and equatorial currents are powerful enough to precipitate the mariners' barks from the eastern to the western hemisphere with great ease. In the year 1500 Cabral started from Portugal with a small fleet for the Cape of Good Hope; but, passing the Cape de Verd Islands, he bore westward to avoid being becalmed on the Guinea coast, and in a few weeks found himself on the coast of Brazil. The distance from Africa to Bra

zil is but about fifteen hundred miles, a voyage none too great for Phoenician enterprise. The problem of immigration from the West is not much more insoluble. The numerous isles of the Pacific served as stages on the way; they were once more numerous than now, many having been submerged even during the human age. They were once populous, civilized, and near neighbors. The Pacific gulf streams even now wreck their sailors in considerable numbers annually upon our shores.

The civilization of Central America is unmistakably Hamitic. Shem was no colonizer by sea, and no architect. Japheth did not develop early on the Mediterranean or Atlantic. But Ham had three great descendants-Nimrod, or Assyria, (or Chaldea;) Mizraim, or Egypt; and Sidon, or Phoenicia; and each one of these has had share in setting an impress upon the American civilization. Ham was a sea-rover and a colonizer, and would easily cross to Chiapa; he was a builder, especially in pyramids, and could readily have founded Palenque and Cholula. He was, like the Mayas, a sun-worshiper, a Molochian offerer of human victims. He bore the deluge tradition and the crux ansata to America. His Egyptian orientation and terracing of the pyramids are there. Thither Phoenicia has sent her serpent and her cosmogonical egg. Assyria has sent thither her "sun symbol," her bearded tree-worshipers, and her outspread sun-wings. Yet it is not so much from Egypt that America has imported her pyramids, which in fact are hardly true pyramids. Her truncated structures came from Babel and Babylon; are partially derived from the Jupiter Bel or Baal temples. In fact, these architectures almost seem to have traveled from Shinar eastward, and to have come round to America across the Pacific. So great a master of comparative architecture as Ferguson affirms that Burmah borrowed her architecture from Babylon; that farther east than Burmah the ruined cities of Cambodia show teocallis (pyramidal sanctuaries) like those of Mexico and Yucatan. Ferguson (as quoted by M'Causland) says, "As we advance eastward from the Valley of the Euphrates, at every step we meet with forms of art becoming more and more like those of Central America;" adding that but for the geographical difficulty no doubt would exist of the derivation of the American architecture from that origin-a difficulty amply solved by Mr. Short.

One record of the Mosaic deluge tradition Mr. Short finds so deeply imbedded in the native history that it cannot be rejected as an appropriation from the Christian missionaries without in

validating all existing Central American history. He summarizes the tradition in these words: "In a preceding chapter we have given the deluge tradition from Ixtilxochitl, who states that the waters rose fifteen cubits (caxtolmolctltli) above the highest mountains, and that a few escaped in a close chest, (toplipetlacali,) and after men had multiplied they erected a very high zacuali, or tower, in order to take refuge in it should the world be again destroyed. He further states that then their speech was confused, so that they could not understand each other, and that they dispersed to different parts of the earth." But the story of sending out three birds as weather explorers is, he thinks, so transparent an appropriation that he can hardly name it with "gravity." Change the names of the birds, and you have just Moses over again. And yet this very story is found, fully detailed, in the Assyrian account, as given by both Smith and Lenormant; and if here aboriginal, is, beyond all question, derived not from Moses but from Assyria. How can Mr. Short reasonably reject this striking passage as too servilely biblical, and yet accept the "fifteen cubits" as aboriginal? Though Lenormant half yields the bird tradition to the higher criticisms of Ramirez, we do not; for where one crucial passage of the flood-tradition is fully admitted there is a fair presumption in favor of other passages, which should check hypercriticism. The existence, also, of two records from distant quarters of the same passage, establishes a favorable presumption for the third. There is a valid probability that Assyria, Palestine, and America possess three copies of the same bird-tradition. And this is all confirmed by the fact that the courier birds of the flood so impress the human mind that they are constantly reappearing in the various traditions. Lenormant finds them in the Iranian tradition in Asia; the dove and olive branch are seen on the Arkite symbols at Apamea, Phrygia; and even among the Chippeway Indians Menabosha (which Lenormant suspects to be the Aryan Manu Vaivasvata) sends a bird out of his bark to know if land be dry, and thus restores our race.

Mr. Short quotes a document to disprove the common statement that the pyramid of Cholula is connected with the Tower of Babel. Our own conclusion is that his document, if admitted as good authority, confirms that connection. The document is simply a verbal narrative uttered by an old inhabitant of Cholula, and recorded by Father Duran, A. D. 1585. The story is, that creation being not quite completed, and the land being "all a plain without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water,

without tree or created thing," certain giants, fascinated with the glory of the new-made sun, endeavored to find his secret place of setting and rising. Defeated in their attempt, (the narrator says,) "they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky. Having collected material for the purpose, they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen, with which they speedily commenced to build the tower, and having reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that they say it reached to the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky, 'Have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamored of the light of the sun and his beauty? Come and confound them, because it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.' Immediately, at that very instant, the inhabitants of the sky sallied forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the edifice, and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth." If criticism admits this as a true aboriginal document, Cholula is a second edition of Babel. The remarkable specialty "clay and bitumen" is a crucial proof. We then have the "tower," the purpose of building to the sky, the bituminous material, the parley of Jehovah in heaven, the defeat of the tower, and the dispersion of the builders through the earth. All this in a series of biblical phrases. The flood is, indeed, in the background. From a deluge by rain it has become a quiet submergence in the incompleteness of the creation. We submit that Cholula is Babel Junior.

Lectures on Electricity in its Relations to Medicine and Surgery. By A. D. RoсKWELL, A.M., M.D., Electro-Therapeutist to the New York State Woman's Hospital, Member of the American Neurological Association, Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. 8vo., pp. 100. New York: Wm. Wood & Co. This little volume, from the pen of this well-known and prolific writer on the subject of electricity in its various applications for the alleviation and cure of disease, although addressed to, and especially intended for, the medical profession, commends itself to the general public as a concise exposition of the advances which have been made in the medical use of this subtle and mysterious agent within the past few years. Soon after the method of exciting electricity by friction was discovered, attempts were made by educated physicians to apply this powerful agent to the cure of disease, but with so little success that these attempts were finally abandoned by regular practitioners of medicine.