FOOTNOTES: (continued 12)
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Doane, T. W. (Thomas William)
"Among the mass of Central American traditions . . . there occur certain passages in the story of an early emigration of the Quiché race, which have much the appearance of vague and broken stories derived in some way from high Northern latitudes."[543:5]
Mr. McCulloh, in his "Researches," observes that:
"In analyzing many parts of their (the ancient Americans') institutions, especially those belonging to their cosmogonal history, their religious superstitions, and astronomical computations, we have, in these abstract matters, found abundant proof to assert that there has been formerly a connection between the people of the two continents. Their communications, however, have taken place at a very remote period of time; for those matters in which they more decidedly coincide, are undoubtedly those which belong to the earliest history of mankind."
It is unquestionably from India that we have derived, partly through the Persians and other nations, most of our metaphysical and theological doctrines, as well as our nursery tales. Who then can deny that these same doctrines and legends have been handed down by oral tradition to the chief of the Indian tribes, and in this way have been preserved, although perhaps in an obscure and imperfect manner, in some instances at least, until the present day? The facts which we have before us, with many others like them which are to be had, point with the greatest likelihood to a common fatherland, the cradle of all nations, from which they came, taking these traditions with them.