We leave Europe and turn to India.

In the Bagaveda-Gita Krishna recalls to the memory of his disciple
Ardjouna the legend as preserved in the sacred books of the Veda.

We are told: 

“The earth was covered with flowers; the trees bent under their fruit; thousands of animals sported over the plains and in the air; white elephants roved unmolested under the shade of gigantic forests, and Brahma perceived that the time had come for the creation of man to inhabit this dwelling-place."[1]

This is a description of the glorious world of the Tertiary Age, during which, as scientific researches have proved, the climate of the tropics extended to the Arctic Circle.

Brahma makes man, Adima, (Adam,) and he makes a companion for him, Héva, (Eve).

They are upon an island.  Tradition localizes the legend by making this the Island of Ceylon.

“Adima and Héva lived for some time in perfect happiness—­no suffering came to disturb their quietude; they had but to stretch forth their hands and pluck from surrounding trees the most delicious fruits—­but to stoop and gather rice of the finest quality.”

This is the same Golden Age represented in Genesis, when Adam and Eve, naked, but supremely happy, lived

[1.  Jacolliet, “The Bible in India,” p. 195.]

{p. 373}

upon the fruits of the garden, and knew neither sorrow nor suffering, neither toil nor hunger.

But one day the evil-one came, as in the Bible legend the Prince of the Rakchasos (Raknaros—­Ragnarok?) came, and broke up this paradise.  Adima and Héva leave their island; they pass to a boundless country; they fall upon an evil time; “trees, flowers, fruits, birds, vanish in an instant, amid terrific clamor";[1] the Drift has come; they are in a world of trouble, sorrow, poverty, and toil.

And when we turn to America we find the legends looking, not westward, but eastward, to this same island-refuge of the race.

When the Navajos come out of the cave the white race goes east, and the red-men go west; so that the Navajos inhabit a country west of their original habitat, just as the Jews inhabit one east of it.

“Let me conclude,” says the legend, “by telling how the Navajos came by the seed they now cultivate.  All the wise men being one day assembled, a Turkey-Hen came flying from the direction of the morning star, and shook from her feathers an ear of blue corn into the midst of the company; and in subsequent visits brought all the other seeds they possess."[2]

In the Peruvian legends the civilizers of the race came from the east, after the cave-life.

So that these people not only came from the east, but they maintained intercourse for some time afterward with the parent-land.

On page 174, ante, we learn that the Iroquois believed that when Joskeha renewed the world, after the great battle with Darkness, he learned from the great tortoise