With regard to my theory on the relatively recent period of American civilisation and its Toltec origin, I am far from being the first in upholding it, since Stephens and Humboldt affirmed it some fifty years ago, whilst all the ancient chroniclers implied it. Is ancient Egypt less interesting because her MSS. are now read and her origin known? Why then should the people who raised the American monuments be less deserving of our regard, because they built them ten centuries sooner or ten centuries later? Does it alter the character of the monuments, or destroy an art unknown to us hitherto? The question of first origins has always seemed to me an idle pursuit; and if the evolutionist doctrine is true, a perfect moral microscope would be required to reach the remote past of man, whose countless generations, scattered in every clime, go back to the dark period when our rude progenitors were hardly distinguished from the brute creation. Will it ever be possible to penetrate beyond? Besides, our ancestors have nothing in common with the autochthones of America, whom I firmly believe to have come from the extreme East. My reasons for this opinion are based on the fact that their architecture is so like the Japanese as to seem identical; that their decorative designs resemble the Chinese; whilst their customs, habits, sculpture, language, castes, and polity recall the Malays both in Cambodia, Annam, and Java. The word “Lacandon,” which is the name of a tribe in Central America, is also, according to Dr. Neis, that of a race in Indo-China, who spell it “Lah-Canh-dong.” F. Gamier says that “the Cambodians build their huts on piles some six or nine feet above the ground. At first sight it might be attributed to the necessity for protecting themselves from inundations; but as this mode of construction is found in places where no such danger exists, it must be ascribed to the _instinct_ of a _particular_ race” (it is the instinct of the Toltecs which caused them to erect their edifices on esplanades and pyramids); and in his description of the _Khmer_ monuments at Angor-Tom and Angor-Wat he adds: “They are placed on pyramids of three to five stories high,” etc. The analogy is also seen in the ornamentation of the buildings, where the human figure is rudely treated, whilst great care is observable in the other decorative designs, a point which always struck us in American sculpture. It should also be remarked that bricks covered with plaster, stucco decoration, cemented floors, roads, and courtyards are common to the Malays and the Americans; whilst the corbel vault is found in Java, Cambodia, and America. Again, some temples at Lawoe, in Java, are built on pyramids, having a staircase on the slope leading to the edifice, like those of the Toltecs. This resemblance has struck every traveller, and is the more important that these monuments only date from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and are far removed