One of the most carefully-investigated bonds of cultural connection between the Eastern Mediterranean in Phœnician times and pre-Columbian America (Tehuantepec) has recently been put on record by Zelia Nuttall in her memoir on “a curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shell-fish for dyeing” (=50=). After a very thorough and critical analysis of all the facts of this truly remarkable case of transmission of an extraordinary custom, Mrs. Nuttall justly concludes that “it seems almost easier to believe that certain elements of an ancient European culture were at one time, and perhaps once only, actually transmitted by the traditional small band of ... Mediterranean seafarers, than to explain how, under totally different conditions of race and climate, the identical ideas and customs should have arisen” (pp. 383 and 384). Nor does she leave us in any doubt as to the route taken by the carriers of this practice. Found in association with it, both in the Old and the New World, was the use of conch-shell trumpets and pearls. The antiquity of these usages is proved by their representation in pre-Columbian pictures or, in the case of the pearls, the finding of actual specimens in graves. In Phœnician Greek, and later times these shell-trumpets were extensively used in the Mediterranean: “European travellers have found them in actual use in East India, Japan and, by the Alfurs, in Ceram, the Papuans of New Guinea, as well as in the South Sea islands as far as New Zealand,” and in many places in America (p. 378). “In the Old and the New World alike, are found, in the same close association, (1) the purple industry and skill in weaving; (2) the use of pearls and conch-shell trumpets; (3) the mining, working and trafficking in copper, silver and gold; (4) the tetrarchial form of government; (5) the conception of ‘Four Elements’; (6) the cyclical form of calendar. Those scholars who assert that all of the foregoing must have been developed independently will ever be confronted by the persistent and unassailable fact that, throughout America, the aborigines unanimously disclaim all share in their production and assign their introduction to strangers of superior-culture from distant and unknown parts” (p. 383). Many other equally definite proofs might be cited of the transmission of customs from the Old to the New World, of which the instance reported by Tylor (=102=) is the classical example[2]; but I know of no other which has been so critically studied and so fully recorded as Mrs. Nuttall’s case. But the difficulty may be raised—as in fact invariably happens when these subjects come up for discussion—as to the means of transmission. Rivers has explained what does actually happen in the contact of peoples (=68=) and how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population (=64= to =70=).