A MARVELLOUS PREHISTORIC CIRCUS.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1987, 7 May 1906, Page 7

A MARVELLOUS PREHISTORIC CIRCUS.

A highly interesting discovery was made at Midway Island, In the North Central Pacific Ocean, recently While digging in the sand a traveller unearthed the thigh bone of an elephant and the pelvic bone of an orangoutang. The discovery of these objects on Midway, a place more than three thousand miles from the mainland, has caused the utmost curiosity. How these bones came on Midway seems a mystery. When the news was told to Professor E. C. (). Quackenkidder, the distinguished Chinese scholar, lie exclaimed at once : “This is another, and perhaps the most important, link in the history to which I have given the best years of my life. I have-not the slightest doubt that the bones of the elephants and orangoutangs found on Midway Island are relies of a circus of an extremely ancient company of performing animals, possibly of the time of that eminently practical Chinese Emperor Hwang-ti, whose reign 1 place anotil 3822 15.C. Circuses existed in China 5,200 years ago. That is most assuredly so. “I am prepared to prove that the circus, much as we know it to-day, not only played a vital part In the religious and sociological history of the Chinese Empire, but was the means of giving this continent its

first population. Unfortunately for us there are few, if any, actual remains to guide us in our search. The Chinese, who were undoubtedly the first to discover in the arena a great moral, civilizing force, preinvented cotton duck in the time of Hwang-ti. This duck was chemically treated in a manner unknown to-day ami used to cover a vast arena, wherein animals and people performed at the bidding of the Emperor. Jt is on account of this pre-inven-tion of duck that we find no monumental relics to help ns in China. “Emperor Hwang-ti, who history tells us was fond of cheerful things, conceived the idea of entertaining and elevating his people by assembling all the trained animals and strange people of his empire under a temporary roof. So great was the success of his first attempt at Shensi that he sent his great aggregation in charge of trusted servants eastward through Yunnan, Kweichow, and Nganhwin. This we learn from the chronicles of Hi, who pre-in vented whisky and vainly sought to introduce his discovery to the crowds that thronged the imperial circus. Iti was finally, beheaded and whisky was not made in China until two thousand years later. “I have followed this remarkable enterprise of Hwang-ti as far as the present coast in its monumental march of progress, and have vainly

sought traces of it in the Sagas of tlie Philippine and other islands. .1 hold that Asia extended over a part i of what is the Pacific Ocean, as far as Midway. Study the chart of the Pacific Ocean's bed and you find a plateau extending west as well as east from Midway. The bones mentioned in the despatch may be those of the identical civilizing aggregation of Fukhi overwhelmed by the volcanic disturbances which changed the whole eastern waters. “I am now coming to the most interesting point suggested by this discovery. Practically every ethnological scholar admits that the Indians came from Asia. The Uehriug Straits theory is childish. What is more probable than (hat the redskins, who afterwards populated North America, escaped from the imperial circus in its eastward journey when the first warnings of volcanic disturbances were heard? “We know from Hi, then in Fu-

khi's circus, (here were wild men of ‘red leather Skin,’ as he described it, who took mightily to his invention of firewater. In fact, it was the strange behaviour of these wild red men that fist called the Emperor's attention to Hi's surreptitiously advertised whisky.” Further researches may throw considerable light on the matter. —“Science Killings,”