There was, along about the beginning of the Christian era, and for some time before and after, a very curious movement, which seemed to spread itself over nearly the entire world, east and west. It is told of the early Aztecs that “they destroyed the records of their predecessors, in order to increase their own prestige.” It is related that writing once existed in Peru, but was entirely wiped out, and the Inca records committed to quipus alone. The “burning of the books” under Tsin Chi Hwangti in B. C. 213 sought to do the same for China. The times of Akbar witnessed much of the same in India. And in Europe almost nothing was left to tell the tale of the great pre-Christian eastern empires and systems of thought; so that from the establishment of State Christianity under Constantine, and the final settlement of the Canon at the Council of Nicaea, an impenetrable veil was drawn over the achievements and greatness of the Past, and all connexion therewith broken off. It was some time after this that we find the heliocentric theory, as well as that of other habitable worlds, denied (in Europe), because “it would deprive the Earth of its unique and central eminence.” Just as we also today are served up with prehistoric savage and animal ancestors, to the greater glory of our own present-day magnificence. But it really is in sober truth only a question of mental perspective which does not affect the facts of history, biology, archaeology or language in the least. It is only a question of which end of the telescope we look through.