As to the compass, we perceive how little that availed, on recalling the fact that the Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvares de Cabral, only eight years later, when following on the route of Vasco de Gama, was carried by the equatorial current so far out of his intended course that he found himself in sight of a strange land, in 10° S. lat., and so accidentally discovered Brazil and the new world of the west, not by means of the mariner’s compass, but in spite of its guidance. It is thus obvious that the discovery of America would have followed as a result of the voyage of Vasco de Gama round the Cape, wholly independent of that of Columbus. What befell the Portuguese admiral of King Manoel, in A.D. 1500, was an experience that might just as readily have fallen to the lot of the Phœnician admiral of Pharaoh Necho in B.C. 600, to the Punic Hanno, or other early navigators; and may have repeatedly occurred to Mediterranean adventurers on the Atlantic in older centuries. On the news of de Cabral’s discovery reaching Portugal, the King despatched the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of South America, prepared a map of the new-found world, and thereby wrested from Columbus the honour of giving his name to the continent which he discovered. When we turn from the myths and traditions of the Old World to those of the New, we find there traces that seem not unfairly interpretable into the American counterpart of the legend of Atlantis. The chief seat of the highest native American civilisation, is neither Mexico nor Peru, but Central America. The nations of the Maya stock, who inhabit Yucatan, Guatemala, and the neighbouring region, were peculiarly favourably situated; and they appear to have achieved the greatest progress among the communities of Central America. They may not unfitly compare with the ancient dwellers in the valley of the Euphrates, from the grave mounds of whose buried cities we are now recovering the history of ages that had passed into oblivion before the Father of History assumed the pen. Tested indeed by intervening centuries their monuments are not so venerable; but, for America’s chroniclings, they are more prehistoric than the disclosures of Assyrian mounds. The cities of Central America were large and populous, and adorned with edifices, even now magnificent in their ruins. Still more, the Mayas were a lettered people, who, like the Egyptians, recorded in elaborate sculptured hieroglyphics the formulæ of history and creed. Like them, too, they wrote and ciphered; and appear, indeed, to have employed a comprehensive system of computing time and recording dates, which, it cannot be doubted, will be sufficiently mastered to admit of the decipherment of their ancient records. The Mayas appear, soon after the Spanish Conquest, to have adopted the Roman alphabet, and employed it in recording their own historical traditions and religious myths, as well as in rendering into