Even so bizarre a practice as the artificial deformation of the head (=48=, pp. 515 to 519), which seems to have originated in Armenia, became added to the repertoire of the fantastic collection of tricks of the “heliolithic” wanderers, and was adopted sporadically by numerous isolated groups of people along the great migration route. For some reason this strange idea “caught on” in America to a greater extent than elsewhere and spread far and wide throughout the greater part of the continent. Many other curious customs might be cited as straws that indicate clearly which way the stream of culture has flowed. For instance Keane (=42=, p. 264) states that “like the Burmese the Nicobarese place a piece of money in the mouth of a corpse before burial to help it in the other world”; and Hutchinson (=38=, p. 448) supplies the link across the Pacific:—“Men, women and children [in ancient Peru] had frequently a bit of copper between the teeth, like the obolus which the pagan Romans used to place in the mouth to pay ferry to the boatman Charon for passage across the Styx.” This reference to Charon reminds us also of the widespread custom, apparently originating in Egypt and spread far and wide, right out into the Pacific and America, of the association of a boat with the funerary ritual, to ferry the mummy to the west. Certain distinctive aspects of phallism in America might also be mentioned as evidence of the influence of Old World practices. In the appendix (part 1) to his “Conquest of Mexico,” Prescott (=59=) summarises fully and fairly the large and highly suggestive mass of evidence available at the time when he wrote in favour of the view that the pre-Columbian civilization of Mexico and Peru had been inspired from Asia. In view of the apparent conclusiveness of his statement of the evidence it becomes a matter of some interest and importance to enquire into the reasons which, in the face of the apparently overwhelming testimony of the facts he has summarised, restrained him from adopting the obvious conclusion to which his whole argument points. Referring to the numerous islands of the Pacific as one means of access of population to America, Prescott quotes Cook’s voyages to illustrate how easily the Polynesians travelled from island to island hundreds of miles apart, and adds, “it would be strange if these wandering barks should not sometimes have been intercepted by the great continent, which stretches across the globe, in unbroken continuity, almost from pole to pole.