No archaeologist, no historian, no philologist will be more startled by the data collected in this book than I have been in their discovery. While I to a certain ex tent foresaw the end toward which the presence of Africans in America before Columbus must ultimately lead in the social and religious orders, I did not allow myself in my first two volumes to be in?uenced by any such considerations, but confined myself to an analysis of the documentary evidence as to the American origin of cotton, tobacco, the bread roots, and wampum.