But if the builders of the strange structures on Easter Island have had, then, communications with the rearers of Tiahuanaco by _land_, then we may easily account for the many coincidences which exist between the laws, religious rites, sciences,--astronomical and others,--customs, monuments, languages, and even dresses, of the inhabitants of this Western continent, and those of Asia and Africa. Hence the similarity of many Asiatic and American notions. Hence, also, the generalized idea of a deluge among men, whose traditions remount to the time when the waters that covered the plains of America, Europe, Africa and Asia left their beds, invaded the portions of the globe they now occupy, and destroyed their inhabitants. Since that time, when, of course, all communications were cut between the few individuals that escaped the cataclysm by taking refuge on the highlands, their intercourse has been renewed at different and very remote epochs--a fact that I can easily prove. But, why should we lose ourselves in the mazes of supposition, where we run a fair chance of wandering astray, when we may recur to the monuments of Yucatan? These are unimpeachable witnesses that the Peninsula was inhabited by civilized people many thousand years ago, even before the time ascribed by the Mosaic records to the creation. Among the ruins of Aké, a city unique in Yucatan for its strange architecture, evidently built by giants, whose bones are now and then disinterred, a city that was inhabited at the time of the conquest, and where the Spaniards retreated for safety after the defeat they suffered at the hands of the dwellers of the country near the ruins of Chichen-Itza, is to be seen an immense building composed of three superposed platforms. The upper one forms a terrace supporting three rows of twelve columns. Each column is composed of eight large square stones, piled one upon the other, without cement, to a height of four metres, and indicate a lapse of 160 years in the life of the nation. These stones are, or were, called _Katun_. Every twenty years, amid the rejoicings of the people, another stone was added to those already piled up, and a new era or epoch was recorded in the history and life of the people. After seven of these stones had thus been placed--that is to say, after a lapse of 140 years--they began the _Ahau-Katun_, or King Katun, when a small stone was added every four years on one of the corners of the uppermost, and at the end of the twenty years of the _Ahau-Katun_, with great ceremonies and feasting, the crowning stone was placed upon the supporting small ones. (The photographs of this monument can be seen at the house of Mr. H. Dixon.) Now, as I have said, we have thirty-six columns composed of eight stones,