The illustrations are nearly all from drawings by the author. The analytical Index has been prepared by Miss Mead. It will be seen, by the numbering at the bottom of each page, that it was at first intended to include this paper in Volume I of the Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Museum; but the addition of the text relating to the Old World made too bulky a volume, and it is therefore issued as Volume II of the series.
To Mrs. Nuttall for the gift of her work, the results of years of research, and to the several generous friends who have provided the means for publishing this volume, the editor expresses his gratitude in behalf of the Museum.
F. W. PUTNAM, Curator of the Peabody Museum. Harvard University, March 1, 1901.
In February, 1898, while engaged upon the translation and commentary of the anonymous Hispano Mexican MS. of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Library, of Florence, my interest was suddenly and unexpectedly diverted from my self-imposed task by the circumstances described in the opening pages of the present publication.
Laying my work aside, as I then supposed, for a few days only, I seized the new thread of investigation with a keen and enthusiastic interest, little knowing that it, in turn, was not only to hold me fast for nearly three years, but was to lead me out of my original field of research, into distant, and to me, hitherto untrodden realms, in close pursuit of facts relating to the oldest forms of religion, social organization, and symbolism.
The first portion of the present publication was planned as a short monograph of forty-one pages, treating of the origin of the native swastika or cross symbols, and was written in July, 1898, its outcome being the unforeseen conclusion that the cosmical conceptions of the ancient Mexicans were identical with those of the Zuñis. I next traced the same fundamental set of ideas in Yucatan, Central America and Peru and formed the wish to add this investigation to the preceding. The result has been the portion of the work extending from page 41, paragraph 2, to page 284, which was printed in 1899.
Having once launched into a course of comparative research, the deep interest I have always taken in the question of Asiatic contact led me to carry my investigation of the same subject into China. It then seemed impossible not to extend researches from Eastern to Western Asia, and from Asia Minor to Egypt, Greece, Rome and Western Europe. It is in this unpremeditated way that the scope of the present investigation enlarged itself of its own accord, for the simple reason that the most interesting and precious facts fell into my way as I advanced and all I had to do was to pick them up and add them to my collection of evidence.