I beg to call your attention to the following facts. They may have no significance. They may be mere coincidences, the strange freaks of hazard, of no possible value in the opinion of some among the learned men of our days. Just as the finding of English words and English customs, as now exist among the most remote nations and heterogeneous people and tribes of all races and colors, who do not even suspect the existence of one another, may be regarded by the learned philologists and ethonologists[TN-6] of two or three thousand years hence. These will, perhaps, also pretend that _these coincidences_ are simply the curious workings of the human mind--the efforts of men endeavoring to express their thoughts in language, that being reduced to a certain number of sounds, must, of necessity produce, if not the same, at least very similar words to express the same idea--and that this similarity does not prove that those who invented them had, at any time, communication, unless, maybe, at the time of the building of the hypothetical Tower of Babel. Then all the inhabitants of earth are said to have bid each other a friendly good night, a certain evening, in a universal tongue, to find next morning that everybody had gone stark mad during the night: since each one, on meeting sixty-nine of his friends, was greeted by every one in a different and unknown manner, according to learned rabbins; and that he could no more understand what they said, than they what he said[TN-7] It is very difficult without the help of the books of the learned priests of _Mayab_ to know positively why they gave that name to the country known to-day as Yucatan. I can only surmise that they so called it from the great absorbant[TN-8] quality of its stony soil, which, in an incredibly short time, absorbs the water at the surface. This percolating through the pores of the stone is afterward found filtered clear and cool in the senotes and caves. _Mayab_, in the Maya language, means a tammy, a sieve. From the name of the country, no doubt, the Mayas took their name, as natural; and that name is found, as that of the English to-day, all over the ancient civilized world.