Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America
The conclusion from this discovery would naturally be, that these institutions, notions, and monuments, are founded in an original connection, - especially as such a conclusion is in strict harmony with popular preju dices. But the philosophical mind will hesitate in ao cepting it, without inquiring how far similar conditions, and like constitutions, mental, moral, and physical, may serve to approximate institutions, religions, and monu ments to a common or cognate type. The Opinions of former scholars cannot be taken as conclusive in this inquiry; for at no previous period of the world's history have the materials for prosecuting it been so abundant as now. The great collateral questions of natural science which have been settled within a few years, the knowledge which maritime and land discoveries have given to us of nearly every nation and people on earth, of their religions, institutions, history, habits, and customs, enabling us to institute comparisons between them all, and to weigh the relations which they sustain toeach other, -these are advantages which students have not hitherto enjoyed, and for the want of which no ability could adequately compensate. For no sciences are so eminently inductive as Archaeology and Ethnology, or the sciences of Man and Nations none which require so extensive a range of facts to their elucidation.
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