a mantle, and on his knees took an oath to maintain the ancient religion.  The priests then instructed him in his royal duties. (Ibid., p. 378.) Besides the regular priesthood there were monks who were confined in cloisters. (Ibid., p. 390.) Cortes says the Mexican priests were very strict in the practice of honesty and chastity, and any deviation was punished with death.  They wore long white robes and burned incense.  (Dorman, “Prim.  Superst.,” p. 379.) The first fruits of the earth were devoted to the support of the priesthood. (Ibid., p. 383.) The priests of the Isthmus were sworn to perpetual chastity.

The American doctors practised phlebotomy.  They bled the sick man because they believed the evil spirit which afflicted him would come away with the blood.  In Europe phlebotomy only continued to a late period, but the original superstition out of which it arose, in this case as in many others, was forgotten.

There is opportunity here for the philosopher to meditate upon the perversity of human nature and the persistence of hereditary error.  The superstition of one age becomes the science of another; men were first bled to withdraw the evil spirit, then to cure the disease; and a practice whose origin is lost in the night of ages is continued into the midst of civilization, and only overthrown after it has sent millions of human beings to untimely graves.  Dr. Sangrado could have found the explanation of his profession only among the red men of America.

Folk-lore.—­Says Max Mueller:  “Not only do we find the same words and the same terminations in Sanscrit and Gothic; not only do we find the same name for Zeus in Sanscrit, Latin, and German; not only is the abstract Dame for God the same in India, Greece, and Italy; but these very stories, these ‘Maehrchen’ which nurses still tell, with almost the same words, in the Thuringian forest and in the Norwegian villages, and to which crowds of children listen under the Pippal-trees of India—­these stories, too, belonged to the common heirloom of the Indo-European race, and their origin carries us back to the same distant past, when no Greek had set foot in Europe, no Hindoo had bathed in the sacred waters of the Ganges.”

And we find that an identity of origin can be established between the folk-lore or fairy tales of America and those of the Old World, precisely such as exists between the, legends of Norway and India.

Mr. Tylor tells us the story of the two brothers in Central America who, starting on their dangerous journey to the land of Xibalba, where their father had perished, plant each a cane in the middle of their grandmother’s house, that she may know by its flourishing or withering whether they are alive or dead.  Exactly the same conception occurs in Grimm’s “Maehrchen,” when the two gold-children wish to see the world and to leave their father; and when their father is sad, and asks them how he shall bear news of them, they tell him, “We leave you the two golden lilies; from these you can see how we fare.  If they are fresh, we are well; if they fade, we are ill; if they fall, we are dead.”  Grimm traces the same idea in Hindoo stories.  “Now this,” says Max Mueller, “is strange enough, and its occurrence in India, Germany, and Central America is stranger still.”