PRE-COLUMBIAN • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Pre-Columbian

"Pre-Columbian" Quotes from Famous Books

... the distribution of the land-masses over the globe. Not till the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two shores of the Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his ...

— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... for metaphysical reasons, imagined the existence of intangible fluids in space—they had, indeed, peopled space several times over with different kinds of ethers, as Maxwell remarks—but such vague dreamings no more constituted the discovery of the modern ether than the dream of some pre-Columbian visionary that land might lie beyond the unknown waters constituted the discovery of America. In justice it must be admitted that Huyghens, the seventeenth-century originator of the undulatory theory of light, caught a glimpse of the true ether; ...

— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... interest and much historical discussion have been aroused in connection with real or imagined pre-Columbian discoveries of America, especially with the discovery by the Northmen. But all attempts to diminish the glory of Columbus' achievement, by proving that the results of previous discoveries were known to him, have, as Hubert Howe Bancroft declares, ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... white-skinned, full-bearded heroes, like the mild Quetzalcoatl, who in times long previous to Columbus came from the far East to impart the rudiments of civilization and religion to the red men. By those who first heard these stories they were supposed, with naive Euhemerism, to refer to pre-Columbian visits of Europeans to this continent, like that of the Northmen in the tenth century. But a scientific study of the subject has dissipated such notions. These legends are far too numerous, they are too similar to each other, they are too manifestly ...

— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

Words linked to "Pre-Columbian" : Columbian