Professor Holmes's theory of the evolution of the cross from the alligator and its location in Chiriqui is opposed to that of Professor Goodyear, who, in his "Grammar of the Lotus," ascribes the origin of the cross to the lotus and locates it in Egypt. I file what in law would be an "interpleader"--I admit my want of knowledge of the subject under discussion, and leave the question to these gentlemen. INTRODUCTION OF THE CROSS INTO AMERICA. Professor Holmes is, in the judgment of the author, correct when he insists upon the aboriginal character of the cross in America. We all understand how it is stated that the Spanish missionaries sought to deny this and to connect the apparition of St. Thomas with the appearance of the cross. Professor Holmes[301] says: The first explorers were accompanied by Christian zealots who spared no effort to root out the native superstition and introduce a foreign religion of which the cross was the all-important symbol. This emblem was generally accepted by the savages as the only tangible feature of a new system of belief that was filled with subtleties too profound for their comprehension. As a result, the cross was at once introduced into the regalia of the natives, at first probably in a European form and material, attached to a string of beads in precisely the manner they had been accustomed to suspend their own trinkets and gorgets; but soon, no doubt, delineated or carved by their own hands upon tablets of stone and copper and shell in the place of their own peculiar conceptions. There is sufficient evidence, and to spare, of the aboriginal use of the cross in some of its forms, without resorting to the uncertain and forced explanation of its introduction by Christian missionaries. It is possible that the priests and explorers were, like Colonel Mallery's missionary, mistaken as to the interpretation given to the cross by the Indians. Dr. Hoffman, in his paper on the "Mide'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa,"[302] states the myth of the re-creation of the world "as thrown together in a mangled form by Hennepin." Dr. Hoffman observes: It is evident that the narrator has sufficiently distorted the traditions to make them conform as much as practicable to the Biblical story of the birth of Christ. And on the same page he quotes from Pêre Marquette, who says: "I was very glad to see a great cross set up in the middle of the village, adorned with several white skins, red girdles, bows, and arrows, which that good people offered to the Great Manitou to return him their thanks for the care he had taken of them during the winter, and that he had granted them a prosperous hunting."