Yet all this is as yet, for the truly scientific ethnologist, only half-fact, indefinite, belonging to the cloud-land of fable.  The poet or the thinker, yearning for a new basis of art, may find in the immense mass of legends and symbols an identification between all the forms of nature in a vast harmony and mutual reflection of every beautiful object; but for the man of facts it is unformed, not arranged, useless.  We know not the color of the race or races which piled the Western mounds; their languages are lost; they are vague mist-gods, living in a dimmer medium than that of mere tradition.  So ends the first period of intercommunication between Asia—­the probable birthplace of the old mythology—­and America.

II.  THE CHINESE DISCOVERERS OF MEXICO IN THE FIFTH CENTURY.

But there is a second link, ere we come to the Norsemen, which is strong enough to merit the favorable consideration of the scientific man, for it rests on evidence worthy serious investigation.  I refer to the fact that the Chinese-Annals, or Year Books,—­which, according to good authority, have been well kept, and which are certainly prosaic and blue-bookish enough in their mass of dry details of embassies and expenditures to be highly credible,—­testify that in the fifth century the Chinese learned the situation of the great peninsula Aliaska, which they named Tahan, or Great China.  Beyond this, at the end of the fifth century,—­be it observed that the advances in discovery correspond in time in the records,—­they discovered a land which Deguignes long after identified with the north-west coast of America.  With each discovery, the people of these new lands were compelled, or were represented at court as having been compelled, to send ambassadors wife tribute to the Central Realm, or China.

But there had been unofficial Chinese travelers in Western America, and even in Mexico itself, before this time.  Those who have examined the history of that vast religious movement of Asia which, contemporary with Christianity, shook the hoary faiths of the East, while a higher and purer doctrine was overturning those of the West, are aware that it had many external points or forms in common with those of the later Roman church, which have long been a puzzle to the wise.  To say nothing of mitres, tapers, violet robes, rosaries, bells, convents, auricular confession, and many other singular identities, the early Buddhist church distinguished itself by a truly catholic zeal for the making of converts, and, to effect this, sent its emissaries to Central Africa and Central Russia; from the Sclavonian frontier on the west to China, Japan, and the farthest Russian isles of the east.  On they went; who shall say where they paused?  We know that there are at this day in St. Petersburg certain books on black paper taken from a Buddhist temple found in a remote northern corner of Russia.  It was much less of an undertaking, and much less singular, that