All these things indicate a people who had passed far beyond barbarism. Here we have axes, swords, helmets, shields, musical instruments, domesticated horses, the use of gold, and stone buildings. And after the great storm was over, and the remnant of mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found in the grass "the golden tablets" of the _Asas_--additional proof that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written language; they also had "the runes," or runic letters of Odin. [1. "The Vala's Prophecy," 48, 49.] {p. 345} In the Norse legends we read that Loke, the evil genius, carried off Iduna, and her _apples_. And when we turn to the American legends, similar statements present themselves. We see the people, immediately after the catastrophe, sending a messenger to the happy eastern land, over the sea, by a bridge, to procure drums and other musical instruments; we learn from the Aztecs that while the darkness yet prevailed, the people built a sumptuous _palace_, a masterpiece of skill, and on the top of it they placed an _axe of copper_, the edge being uppermost, and on this axe the heavens rested.[1] The Navajos, shut up in their cave, had flute-players with them. The Peruvians were dug out of their cave with a golden _spade_. In the Tahoe legend, we read that the superior race compelled the inferior to build a great _temple_ for their protection from floods; and the oppressed people escaped in _canoes_, while the world blazes behind them. Soon after the Navajos came out of the cave, we find them, according to the legend, possessed of water-jars, and we have references to the division of the heavens into constellations. In the Arabian legend of the City of Brass, we are told that the people who were destroyed were great architects, metallurgists, agriculturists, and machinists, and that they possessed a written language. We turn now to the more reliable evidences of man's condition, which have been exhumed from the caves and the Drift. In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao, [1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 71.] {p. 346} "met with a ship, _which had on top of it the great mass of the hill_, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships." Sir John Clerk describes a canoe found near Edinburgh, in 1726. "The washings of the river Carron discovered a _boat thirteen or fourteen feet under ground_; it is thirty-six feet long and four and a half broad, all of one piece of oak. There were several strata above it, such as loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel." Boucher de Perthes found remains of man _thirty to forty feet_ below the surface of the earth. In the following we have the evidence that the pre-glacial race was acquainted with the use of fire, and cooked their food: