It was not a long period after 1492, when the great Italian navigator
with his Spanish crew made their first discoveries upon the central
portion of America, that the Europeans, who had followed the footsteps
of Christopher Columbus, began to fall in with structures of great
magnitude and architectural beauty scattered widely throughout Mexico,
Guatemala and Yucatan, &c.; and when the conquest of Peru was achieved,
artificial highways and water courses were found there, such as could
have owed their existence to no people but one with advanced knowledge
of science as well as of the arts of civilized life. No people existed
then upon this continent capable of doing the work which so astonished
the world.
Thinking men and dreaming men have, from the earliest of these
discoveries, been busying themselves to find out when, and by what
people, these early monuments to human efforts were constructed.
Norwegian discoverers and Welsh emigrants have been pressed into the
service. Our own Donnelly has changed the place where God and history
had located the origin of the human race in the valley of the Tigris and
Euphrates, to a suppositious island in the Atlantic Ocean, and led out
the nations of the earth from there to Asia, Africa and western Europe,
until he had no further need of the island and then sunk it in "the
bottom of the sea."
A whole people have been pressed into the service of explaining this
mystery. The convenient "Lost ten tribes of the House of Israel" have
been set to do this work, as their fathers were compelled to "make brick
without straw" in the Land of Egypt, and then suffered to escape to some
land where search for them would be in vain.