have been received by the rude savages among whom they were cast as gods in human form, and have succeeded in imparting to them their superior civilization; but they could never have imposed upon them their language. On the contrary, they would themselves adopt the language of the multitude, and, being few in number, would in time become so amalgamated with the natives, as to leave behind them only a tradition, and those indestructible records of their connection with the old Asiatic world to be found in monuments, legends, and peculiar customs. These unintentional migrations may have occurred many times in the world's history, at different epochs and from various points, which would account for the variations observable in the civilization of Peru and Mexico, and other American countries which, having had apparently no communication with each other, yet present, in the midst of remarkable differences, certain peculiar points of resemblance.

A glance at a map of ocean currents will show that a frail vessel from the coasts of Asia, drawn into some of these, would be carried by them to the American shore just at those points where the most decided traces of Asiatic civilization are to be found. Undoubtedly one of the many clues to this inquiry will be found in the range of certain mythological birds, which, as I have endeavoured to point out, are peculiarly adopted by certain races. Wherever we find serpent traditions, and with them the egg as the origin of the world or of the primeval pair, there we generally find the goose, the swan, or the hawk, revered as the emblem of the principal divinity, and this goose or hawk is often confounded or identified with the phoenix, which appears to combine in itself the form and plumage of the hawk, the goose, and the peacock, all pre-eminently Turanian birds; and, although we find the egg sacred also in Semitic Assyria in connection with the dove, it is never supposed to have been laid by that bird, nor does it appear in connection with the serpent or the formation of the world; but it is a large egg falling from heaven,

hatched by doves, and from it proceeds, not the world, or the first man and woman, but Astarte or Venus, the Goddess of Beauty, and this change in the character of the egg would appear to me to be owing to the engrafting of later Semitic beliefs upon the old Turanian cosmogony which once flourished in Chaldæa.

Whether the eagle-headed divinity so prominent in Assyrian sculptures was also originally the Turanian hawk, the peculiar emblem of the sun-god in Egypt and elsewhere, or whether it was the germ from which sprang the Aryan eagle, it is difficult to determine; but I should be inclined to think it was at first the hawk, modified later under Aryan influences into the eagle, as was the case with Garuda in India. In Persia the dove was the emblem of Mithras, the sun-god, but we find that the eagle was the royal bird, emblematic of Ormuzd, and we are told by Creuzer, that the chief of the eunuchs always endeavoured to give to the nose of the prince royal the form of an eagle's beak, in honour of Cyrus, whose nose was of that shape.

In noticing the eagle as pre-eminently the bird of the Aryans, two or three marked peculiarities in his history must be borne in mind. First, he is always the emblem of the younger, but more potent, divinities, who have conquered or superseded the older gods; thus he is the emblem of Krishna in India-a late incarnation of Vishnu; and even as Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu, is called the younger brother of Arun, the charioteer of Indra, the old nature god of the aborigines, and although he is fabled to have sprung from the egg of Diti, the wife of the Indian Casyapa or Uranus, it was only after the lapse of five hundred years when he destroys the serpents, and seizes the water of life.

In Greece and Rome he is the favourite emblem of Zeus and Jupiter, those younger divinities who overcame Chronos and Saturn, and reigned in their stead; but there he never has any connection with the great mundane egg. If this egg appears at all in Grecian and Roman mythology, it is apparently only as a survival of older beliefs, and is always associated, not with

N

the eagle, but with the swan-the Aryan form, as I believe, of the old Turanian goose. But the great and peculiar characteristic of this bird is his stronglymarked antagonism to the serpent, denoted in India by his name-nag-autika, snake-destroyer an antagonism which I believe to symbolize an antagonism of race, and to denote the conquest of the old Turanian serpentworshippers by the aggressive Aryans.

With regard to the phenix, that enigma of the ancient world, Mr. Tylor gives a Chinese legend, which seems to point to the origin of this myth. "A great sage went to walk beyond the bounds of the moon and the sun; he saw a tree, and on the tree a bird, which pecked at it and made fire come forth; the sage was struck with this, took a branch and produced fire from it." 1

The sculptures of Nineveh and Babylon, representing the eagle Nisrock perched on the sacred tree or cross, have possibly some reference to the Chinese myth, and we are told in Baring Gould's Myths of the Middle Ages, that in the depths of the forests of Central America, in a palace founded, according to tradition, in the ninth century B.C., there is a sculptured cross, surrounded with rich feather-work and ornamental chains, and above the cross a bird of peculiar character, perched as we see the eagle, Nisrock, on the cross.

In the Athapascan myth, a raven saved their ancestors from the general flood, and this is identified with the great thunder-bird, who brought, in the beginning, the earth from the depths. Prometheus-like, it, brought fire from heaven, and saved them from a second death by cold. Precisely the same benefits were attributed by the Natchez to the small red cardinal bird.2

Now the phœnix is undoubtedly the true fire-bird.3 Flying from the East, he goes to immolate himself by fire in the Temple of the Sun, at Heliopolis, and out of his ashes comes an egg, from which proceeds a worm, which rapidly develops into a young phœnix in full feather, who flies away eastward, to return again after five or six hundred years, and himself perish in the same manner by fire. Another version tells us of the newly-born phœnix taking a ball of myrrh of the weight of his father's body, hollowing it out, and enclosing the dead body therein, and then flying with this egg of myrrh to Heliopolis, there to consume it by fire. Now the remarkable thing in this legend is that it seems to combine in itself the germs of all the religions which prevailed in the pre-Aryan world. We see in it, sunworship and sacrifice by fire to that great deity. We see in it the egg and the worm or serpent, both so highly revered everywhere in the ancient world, and we may also trace in it that reverence for ancestors so characteristic of Turanian races, shown by the care with which the young phœnix embalms his father's body in myrrh, and conveys it to the Temple of the Sun. It seems to me, that to this myth may be traced the form of the Assyrian Nisrock, with the eagle's head and the fir-cone in his hand, indicative of the myrrh egg of the phenix; and it is not improbable that it may have originated the form of the Garuda of Vishnu, who is represented as half-man, half-bird, sometimes with a red comb and beak, his robe red, his face, arms, and pinions green; the feathers of his wings and tail green and blue; and he is sometimes represented spread and double-headed like the Prussian eagle. The phenix may also have had some connection with the old Mexican deity, Quetzalcoatl, whose name we are told signifies green-feathered serpent, and who is often represented as a man with green plumes and tail like a bird, having also some affinity to the humming-bird, perhaps because the brilliancy of the plumage of this little winged gem would recall the fabled glories of the Eastern phœnix. It is certain that among Egyptian sculptures the phenix is sometimes represented as a winged man, with a tuft of feathers on his head.

"It was probably," says Brinton, "the eagle which was worshipped in Upper California, under the name of Panes. But," he adds, "Father Geronimo Boscana describes it as a species of vulture, and relates that one of them was immolated yearly with solemn ceremony in the temple of each village. Not a drop of blood was spilled, and the body was burned; yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year; more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages." 1 Have we not here also a repetition of the phenix legend of the East?

It would appear that among Aryan nations the cock was in some sense the successor of the phenix, the representative of the sun-gods of Greece and Rome, and probably also, later, of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, where we find it frequently represented on the monuments; but whether these are of early or late date, I must leave others to judge. Quetzalcoatl was undoubtedly an early god, adopted by later races into their mythology, as was Jupiter in Rome; and it is remarkable, that as the eagle was the messenger of Jupiter, so in Mexico it was the eagle which conveyed to Quetzalcoatl the mode of his father's death.

It seems natural that a bird should be chosen as the representative of aërial phenomena; but when we find it in many far distant countries, associated with the introduction of fire, we are tempted to the belief that in some manner these countries have received an ancient myth from some common source, and that that myth bore reference to the early discovery of fire, perhaps, as suggested in the Chinese legend, from sparks produced by the beak of a bird striking some very dry tree, and this bird may possibly have been one of the brilliantly-coloured wood-peckers, afterwards transformed by fancy into the gorgeous phœnix, and changed, according to the country to which the myth was borne, into the goose, the cardinal bird, the raven, the eagle, the robin, and various others, all, however varied in form, yet bearing