“Ye say their cone-like cabins That clustered o’er the vale Have fled away like withered leaves Before the autumn gale. But their memory liveth on your hills, Their baptism on your shore; Your everlasting rivers speak Their dialect of yore.” And she might have added that their gods have seated themselves with those of the Greeks in our libraries; that Michabo, Tlaloc, Quetzalcohuatl, and others are now companions of Jupiter and Neptune; in short, that their literature, which relied on oral transmission, has to a large extent been crystallised in our printed pages. The Amerind, not fortified by our modern knowledge and philosophy, regarded the outer world in a far different way from what we do. To him it was not a place where a gold mine might be found, or good grazing or tillable soil, but he looked upon the far distance as the home of magical beings. Did the wind blow? It was the breath of some monster dwelling in a cave in the far west, or it was the beating of the wings of giant birds living at the four quarters of the compass. It was not to the sky alone that he looked for the abode of his gods; they came to him from every direction, even from the bowels of the earth. We know what the earth contains and we grope for the unknown. The Amerind did not know what the earth contains; it was still to him the abode of monsters and ghosts. There is in some respects so great a similarity between the myths of the New World and those of the Old, that it was at first assumed that there must have been early communication with Europe, but more careful analysis has shown that this is but another evidence of what may be called the parallelism of human development. Even where the similarity is greatest there is nothing to prove that the myths did not originate independently, and they are merely the results of similar thoughts, in similar stages of ignorance, about the sun, the sky, and natural forces.