Dr. A. B. Arnold, of Baltimore, argues that, with the present state of our anthropological knowledge and the material that research has been able to furnish, we need no longer be surprised to find customs, laws, and morals, among nations living in regions of the world widely apart from each other, which betray an identity of origin and development, and that beliefs and institutions, whether wise or aberrant, grow up under apparently dissimilar circumstances, circumcision forming no exception.[7] Dr. Arnold leaves too much to chance. It is hardly likely that the similarity that existed between the architecture of the Phoenicians and the Central Americans, as evinced in their arches; in the beginning of the century on the 26th of February; the advancement and interest taken in astronomical science; the coexistence of pyramids in Egypt and Central America; that five Armenian cities should have their namesakes in Central America, should all be a matter of accident. The historiographer of the Canary Islands, M. Benshalet, considers that those islands once formed a part of the great continent to its west; this has been verified by the discovery of many sculptured symbols, similar in the Canaries and on the shores of Lake Superior, as well as by the discovery of a mummy in the Canaries with sandals whose exact counterparts were found in Central America.[8] A compound word used to signify the Great Spirit being found identical in the Welsh and Mandan languages, each requiring five distinct sounds to pronounce, words as intricate as the passwords of secret societies, can hardly be said to be the result of chance.[9] There must, at some remote period, have existed some communication between the ancestors of these Missouri Mandans and the shores of ancient Armorica; the ancestors of these Mandans may have then been living farther to the east; they even may have then been a tribe of since lost Atlantis; but the analogy, not only in regard to the word just mentioned,--_Maho-peneta_, of the Welsh and Mandan,--but in the similarity of the pronouns of both languages, and the existence of the idea of the counterpart of the sacred white bull of the Egyptians being found among the Dakotas, or Sioux, all point to the fact that these people, in common with the rest of the Americans, originally came from the East; from whence came their languages, manners, customs, rites, and what civilization they possessed, among which circumcision has, through the mist of centuries, held its own in some shape or other.