And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, the Indians had cultivated plants--notably that maize, sometimes called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been imported into North America from the south. [Illustration: MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.] Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth deity to grant them good harvests. [Sidenote: Egypt and Mexico] These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to be gaining adherents.