When, on January 28, 1873, I had the honor of reading a paper before the New York American Geographical Society--on the coincidences that exist between the monuments, customs, religious rites, etc. of the prehistoric inhabitants of America and those of Asia and Egypt--I pointed to the fact that sun circles, dolmen and tumuli, similar to the megalithic monuments of America, had been found to exist scattered through the islands of the Pacific to Hindostan; over the plains of the peninsulas at the south of Asia, through the deserts of Arabia, to the northern parts of Africa; and that not only these rough monuments of a primitive age, but those of a far more advanced civilization were also to be seen in these same countries. Allow me to repeat now what I then said regarding these strange facts: If we start from the American continent and travel towards the setting sun we may be able to trace the route followed by the mound builders to the plains of Asia and the valley of the Nile. The mounds scattered through the valley of the Mississippi seem to be the rude specimens of that kind of architecture. Then come the more highly finished teocalis of Yucatan and Mexico and Peru; the pyramidal mounds of _Maui_, one of the Sandwich Islands; those existing in the Fejee and other islands of the Pacific; which, in China, we find converted into the high, porcelain, gradated towers; and these again converted into the more imposing temples of Cochin-China, Hindostan, Ceylon--so grand, so stupendous in their wealth of ornamentation that those of Chichen-Itza Uxmal, Palenque, admirable as they are, well nigh dwindle into insignificance, as far as labor and imagination are concerned, when compared with them. That they present the same fundamental conception in their architecture is evident--a platform rising over another platform, the one above being of lesser size than the one below; the American monuments serving, as it were, as models for the more elaborate and perfect, showing the advance of art and knowledge.