To primitive races, national genealogy is above all things attractive; and the question was raised as to the possible blood relationship between themselves and the Mexicans, through the Phœnicians. I will not rehearse the conversation, but cannot at once dismiss the subject. That Western world may have had its beginning, its progress, its multifarious phases, its great existencies, its long life, and its decay in the same way that we have had ours, without there being a necessary connexion, although there be infinite points of resemblance with the numerous forms and accidents of Egypt and Etruria, of India and Chaldea. Still, the objection to intercourse, on the score of insuperable obstacles in the navigation of the oceans on either side, appears to me to be, in a philosophic age, the most strange of hallucinations. Every dot upon the surface of the water has been found occupied by the human race, and there have been indubitable crossings, both of the Pacific and Atlantic, by large vessels and junks, and by small boats and canoes. The tradition of the Atlantic Islands seems an indubitable, though indistinct trace, amongst the Greeks, of a Phœnician discovery. If, as I believe, I have almost succeeded in showing the magnetic needle was possessed by that people, the obstacles to the crossing the Atlantic, and to continuous intercourse, are still further removed. It was not, however, until I entered the room which I here occupy, that I perceived direct proof of this connexion. There hangs up an ornamented Table of the Law, such as is common in the houses of the Jews--that mysterious open hand on the one side; on the other, a diagram, which occupies a prominent place in the symbols of Masonry, the double triangle. It is also a cabalistic and astrological figure. It forms five points, and is, I believe (not the six-pointed one), the proper “Solomon’s seal.” They could give no explanation of its meaning or origin, and only said, “It has been always so.” I find this same sign is on the signet of the Sultan, and on his coin. The Moors have adopted it as their arms. They, no more than the Jews, can tell what it means. It is lost in the mists of their common antiquity. The very same symbol is found in Mexico. Roads, worthy of being compared to, and alone rivalling (by the confession of Humboldt) those of the Romans; pottery, equalling, and resembling, that of the Etruscans; resemblances of costume, as with the head-dress of the Etruscans; instruments of music, the double flute of the Curians--do not go so far to indicate a connexion, as the adoption of a symbol such as this; but when you have an exact correspondence in a peculiar and arbitrary figure, then other resemblances may be admitted, as furnishing corroborative proof of a common matrix, if not for the races, at least for their arts.