One might have imagined that such an instance, especially when backed with the authority[18] of our greatest anthropologist, who certainly has no bias in favour of the views I am promulgating, would have carried conviction to the mind of anyone willing to be convinced by precise evidence. But not to Mr. Keane! In endeavouring to whittle down the significance of this crucial case, he incidentally illustrates the lengths of unreason to which this school of ethnologists will push their argument, when driven to formulate a _reductio ad absurdum_ without realizing the magnitude of the absurdity their blind devotion to a catch-word impels them to perpetrate. In Keane’s “Ethnology” (=41=, pp. 217-219) the following passages are found:— “It is further to be noticed that religious ideas, like social usages, are easily transmitted from tribe to tribe, from race to race. [Most of my critics base their opposition on a denial of these very assumptions!] Hence resemblances in this order, where they arise, must rank very low as ethnical tests. If not the product of a common cerebral structure, they can prove little beyond social contact in remote or later times. A case in point is [Tylor’s statement, which I have just quoted]. “The parallelism is complete; but the range of thought is extremely limited—nothing but mountains and knives, beside the river of death common to Egyptians, Greeks, and all peoples endowed with a little imagination.” “Hence Prof. E. B. Tylor, who calls attention to the points of resemblance, builds far too much on them when he adduces them as convincing evidence of pre-Columbian culture in America taking shape under Asiatic influences. In the same place he refers to Humboldt’s argument based on the similarity of calendars and of mythical catastrophes. But the ‘mythical catastrophes,’ floods and the like, have long been discounted, while the Mexican calendar, despite the authority of Humboldt’s name, presents no resemblance whatsoever to those of the ‘Tibetan and Tartar tribes,’ or to any other of the Asiatic calendars with which it has been compared. ‘There is absolutely no similarity between the Tibetan calendar and the primitive form of the American,’ which, ‘was not intended as a year-count, but as a ritual and formulary,’ and whose signs ‘had nothing to do with the signs of the zodiac, as had all those of the Tibetan and Tartar calendars’ (D. G. Brinton, ‘On various supposed Relations between the American and Asian races,’ from _Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology_, Chicago, p. 148). Regarding all such analogies as may exist ‘between the culture and customs of Mexico and those of China, Cambodia, Assyria, Chaldæa, and Asia Minor,’ Dr. Brinton asks pertinently, ‘Are we, therefore, to transport all these ancient peoples, or representatives of them, into Mexico?’ (_ib._ p, 147). So Lefevre, who regards as ‘quite chimerical’ the attempts made to trace such resemblances to the Old World. ‘If there