washing and cleansing.  I pray that this celestial water, blue and light blue, may enter into thy body, and there live; I pray that it may destroy in thee and put away from thee all the things evil and adverse that were given thee before the beginning of the world. . . .  Wheresoever thou art in this child, O thou hurtful thing, begone! leave it, put thyself apart; for now does it live anew, and anew is it born; now again is it purified and cleansed; now again is it shaped and engendered by our mother, the goddess of water.” (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii., p. 372.)

Here we find many resemblances to the Christian ordinance of baptism:  the pouring of the water on the head, the putting of the fingers in the mouth, the touching of the breast, the new birth, and the washing away of the original sin.  The Christian rite, we know, was not a Christian invention, but was borrowed from ancient times, from the great storehouse of Asiatic traditions and beliefs.

The Mexicans hung up the heads of their sacrificed enemies; this was also a Jewish custom: 

“And the Lord said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.  And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baal-peor.”  (Numb., xxv., 4, 5.)

The Scythians, Herodotus tells us, scalped their enemies, and carried the scalp at the pommel of their saddles; the Jews probably scalped their enemies: 

“But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his trespasses.” (Psa., lxviii., 21.)

The ancient Scandinavians practised scalping.  When Harold Harefoot seized his rival, Alfred, with six hundred followers, he “had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled.” (Taine’s “Hist.  Eng.  Lit.,” p. 35.)

Herodotus describes the Scythian mode of taking the scalp:  “He makes a cut round the head near the ears, and shakes the skull out.”  This is precisely the Indian custom.  “The more scalps a man has,” says Herodotus, “the more highly he is esteemed among them.”

The Indian scalp-lock is found on the Egyptian monuments as one of the characteristics of the Japhetic Libyans, who shaved all the head except one lock in the middle.

The Mantchoos of Tartary wear a scalp-lock, as do the modern Chinese.

Byron describes the heads of the dead Tartars under the walls of Corinth, devoured by the wild dogs: 

     “Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear,
     And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,
     All the rest was shaven and bare.”

These resemblances are so striking and so numerous that repeated attempts have been made to prove that the inhabitants of America are the descendants of the Jews; some have claimed that they represented “the lost tribes” of that people.  But the Jews were never a maritime or emigrating people; they formed no colonies; and it is impossible to believe (as has been asserted) that they left their flocks and herds, marched across the whole face of Asia, took ships and sailed across the greatest of the oceans to a continent of the existence of which they had no knowledge.