[352] [The existence at some former period of such an island, or rather continent, seems to be regarded by geologists as a well-attested fact. But few would admit that its subsidence can have taken place through any sudden convulsion or within the period of human existence. Such, however, is the theory maintained by M. Brasseur de Bourbourg, who dates the event “six or seven thousand years ago,” and believes that the traditions of it have been faithfully preserved. This is the great cataclysm with which all mythology begins. It may be traced through the myths of Greece, Egypt, India, and America, all being identical and having a common origin. It is the subject of the Teo-Amoxtli, of which several of the Mexican manuscripts, the Borgian and Dresden Codices in particular, are the hieroglyphical transcriptions, and of which “the actual letter,” “in the Nahuatlac language,” is found in a manuscript in Boturini’s Collection. This manuscript is “in appearance” a history of the Toltecs and of the kings of Colhuacan and Mexico; but “under the ciphers of a fastidious chronology, under the recital more or less animated of the Toltec history, are concealed the profoundest mysteries concerning the geological origin of the world in its existing form and the cradle of the religions of antiquity.” The Toltecs are “telluric powers, agents of the subterranean fire;” they are identical with the Cabiri, who reappear as the Cyclops, having “hollowed an eye in their forehead; that is to say, raised themselves with masses of earth above the surface and filled the craters of the volcanoes with fire.” “The Chichimecs and the Aztecs are also symbolical names, borrowed from the forces of nature.” Tollan, “the marshy or reedy place,” was “the low, fertile region” now covered by the Gulf of Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is “merely the personification of the land swallowed up by the ocean.” Tlapallan, Aztlan, and other names are similarly explained. Osiris, Pan, Hercules, and Bacchus have their respective parts assigned to them; for “not only all the sources of ancient mythology, but even the most mysterious details, even the obscurest enigmas, with which that mythology is enveloped, are to be sought in the two mediterraneans hollowed out by the cataclysm, and in the islands, great and small, which separate them from the ocean.” (Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique.) There can be no refutation of such a theory, or of the assumptions on which it rests; but it may be proper to remark that its author has not succeeded in deciphering a single hierogiyphical character, and has published no translation of the real or supposed Teo-Amoxtli,—a point on which some misapprehension seems to exist.—K.]
[353] Count Carli shows much ingenuity and learning in support of the famous Egyptian tradition, recorded by Plato in his “Timæus,”—of the good faith of which the Italian philosopher nothing doubts. Lettres Améric., tom. ii. let. 36-39.
[354] Garcia, Orígen de los Indios de el nuevo Mundo (Madrid, 1729), cap. 4.
[355] Torquemada, Monarch. Ind., lib. 1, cap. 8.
[356] Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London, 1826), vol. i. p. 81, et seq.—He may find an orthodox authority of respectable antiquity, for a similar hypothesis, in St. Augustine, who plainly intimates his belief that, “as by God’s command, at the time of the creation, the earth brought forth the living creature after his kind, so a similar process must have taken place after the deluge, in islands too remote to be reached by animals from the continent.” De Civitate Dei, ap. Opera (Parisiis, 1636), tom. v. p. 987.
[357] Beechey, Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait (London, 1831), Part 2, Appendix.—Humboldt, Examen critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau-Continent (Paris, 1837), tom. ii. p. 58.
[358] Whatever skepticism may have been entertained as to the visit of the Northmen, in the eleventh century, to the coasts of the great continent, it is probably set at rest in the minds of most scholars since the publication of the original documents by the Royal Society at Copenhagen. (See, in particular, Antiquitates Americanæ (Hafniæ, 1837), pp. 79-200.) How far south they penetrated is not so easily settled.
[359] The most remarkable example, probably, of a direct intercourse between remote points is furnished us by Captain Cook, who found the inhabitants of New Zealand not only with the same religion, but speaking the same language, as the people of Otaheite, distant more than 2000 miles. The comparison of the two vocabularies establishes the fact. Cook’s Voyages (Dublin, 1784), vol. i. book 1, chap. 8.
[360] The eloquent Lyell closes an enumeration of some extraordinary and well-attested instances of this kind with remarking, “Were the whole of mankind now cut off, with the exception of one family, inhabiting the old or new continent, or Australia, or even some coral islet of the Pacific, we should expect their descendants, though they should never become more enlightened than the South Sea Islanders or the Esquimaux, to spread, in the course of ages, over the whole earth, diffused partly by the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence in a limited district, and partly by the accidental drifting of canoes by tides and currents to distant shores.” Principles of Geology (London, 1832), vol. ii. p. 121.
[361] “La question générale de la première origine des habitans d’un continent est au-delà des limites prescrites à l’histoire; peut-être même n’est-elle pas une question philosophique.” Humboldt, Essai politique, tom. i. p. 349.