As, in process of time, they gradually or suddenly settled {p. 377} into the deep, they must at first have formed long, continuous strings of islands, almost touching each other, resembling very much the Aleutian Archipelago, or the Bahama group; and these islands continued to be used, during later ages, as the stepping-stones for migrations and intercourse between the old and the new worlds, just as the discovery of the Azores helped forward the discovery of the New World by Columbus; he used them, we know, as a halting-place in his great voyage. When Job speaks of "the island of the innocent," which was spared from utter destruction, he prefaces it by asking, (chap. xxii): "15. Hast thou marked _the old way_ which wicked men have trodden? "16. Which were (was?) cut down out of time, _whose foundation was overflown with a flood_." And in chapter xxviii, verse 4, we have what may be another allusion to this "way," along which go the people who are on their journey, and which "divideth the flood," and on which some are escaping. The Quiche manuscript, as translated by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg,[1] gives an account of the migration of the Quiche race to America from some eastern land in a very early day, in "the day of darkness," ere the sun was, in the so-called glacial age. When they moved to America they wandered for a long time through forests and over mountains, and "they had a _long passage to make, through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand_." And this long passage was through the sea "which was parted for their passage." That is, the sea was on both sides of this long ridge of rocks and sand. [1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 308.] {p. 378} The abbé adds: "But it is not clear how they crossed the sea; they passed as though there had been no sea, for they passed over scattered rocks, and these rocks were rolled on the sands. This is why they called the place 'ranged stones and torn-up sands,' the name which they gave it in their passage within the sea, the water being divided when they passed." They probably migrated along that one of the connecting ridges which, the sea-soundings show us, stretched from Atlantis to the coast of South America. We have seen in the Hindoo legends that when Rama went to the Island of Lanka to fight the demon Ravana, he built a bridge of stone, sixty miles long, with the help of the monkey-god, in order to reach the island. In Ovid we read of the "settling down a little" of the island on which the drama of Phaëton was enacted. In the Norse legends the bridge Bifrost cuts an important figure. One would be at first disposed to regard it as meaning, (as is stated in what are probably later interpolations,) the rainbow; but we see, upon looking closely, that it represents a material fact, an actual structure of some kind.