Here, too, we have the Pillars of Hercules, supposed to have been placed at the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the tree of life or knowledge, with the serpent twined around it, which appears in Genesis; and in the combination of the two pillars and the serpent we have, it is said, the original source of our dollar mark [$].

Coin from central America

Compare these Phoenician coins with the following representation of a copper coin, two inches in diameter and three lines thick, found nearly a century ago by Ordonez, at the city of Guatemala.  “M.  Dupaix noticed an indication of the use of the compass in the centre of one of the sides, the figures on the same side representing a kneeling, bearded, turbaned man between two fierce heads, perhaps of crocodiles, which appear to defend the entrance to a mountainous and wooded country.  The reverse presents a serpent coiled around a fruit-tree, and an eagle on a hill.” (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iv., p. 118.) The mountain leans to one side:  it is a “culhuacan,” or crooked mountain.

We find in Sanchoniathon’s “Legends of the Phoenicians” that Ouranus, the first god of the people of Atlantis, “devised Baetulia, contriving stones that moved as having life, which were supposed to fall from heaven.”  These stones were probably magnetic loadstones; in other words, Ouranus, the first god of Atlantis, devised the mariner’s compass.

I find in the “Report of United States Explorations for a Route for a Pacific Railroad” a description of a New Mexican Indian priest, who foretells the result of a proposed war by placing a piece of wood in a bowl of water, and causing it to turn to the right or left, or sink or rise, as he directs it.  This is incomprehensible, unless the wood, like the ancient Chinese compass, contained a piece of magnetic iron hidden in it, which would be attracted or repulsed, or even drawn downward, by a piece of iron held in the hand of the priest, on the outside of the bowl.  If so, this trick was a remembrance of the mariner’s compass transmitted from age to age by the medicine men.  The reclining statue of Chac-Mol, of Central America, holds a bowl or dish upon its breast.

Divination was the ars Etrusca.  The Etruscans set their temples squarely with the cardinal points of the compass; so did the Egyptians, the Mexicans, and the Mound Builders of America.  Could they have done this without the magnetic compass?

The Romans and the Persians called the line of the axis of the globe cardo, and it was to cardo the needle pointed.  Now “Cardo was the name of the mountain on which the human race took refuge from the Deluge . . . the primitive geographic point for the countries which were the cradle of the human race.” (Urquhart’s “Pillars of Hercules,” vol. i., p. 145.) From this comes our word “cardinal,” as the cardinal points.

Navigation.—­Navigation was not by any means in a rude state in the earliest times: