Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/103

Rh placed, as it appears to me to admit of other satisfactory explanations — there is no record or tradition in any part of the world of such changes having been made since the deluge in those particular parts where the connecting lands can be supposed to have existed. If they ever did occur, it must have been at a very early period, which, indeed, is the supposition' of those who advocate this theory, to account for the numerous population found by the Spaniards in America, divided into so many distinct nations, speaking entirely distinct languages. If we could not account for this state of the population in America by other more probable means consistent with the habits of man as a migratory being, then we might feel bound to assent to that theory, notwithstanding the absence of all historical authority in its favour. But when we can find facts of constant frequent recurrence, of men seeking voluntarily, or driven violently into new abodes, I think it would be extremely unwise to strain after a fanciful solution of a question, which is of itself so easy of explanation otherwise.

Whether the deluge took place only at the period at which the common computations assign it, or from one to two thousand years earlier, as Dr. Hales and Bishop Russell have more correctly shewn it to have been, it appears to me clear, from all we can judge of the state in which the American Indians were found at the beginning of the sixteenth century, that they were then only of comparatively recent immigration, and neither from their numbers, nor from their political condition, likely to have been descendants of tribes or persons who had proceeded thither so long time back as before, or even some centuries after, the deluge. This is also the opinion of one of the best of the earlier writers on America, shortly after the conquest, Joseph Acosta, who visited the New World about fifty years after the discovery, and whose work was first published in 1586. He says, "Qua etiam ex re magis adducor ut putem hunc novum orbem occidentalem non multis abhinc annorum millibus habitatum." This his commentator, De Laet, understood to mean, that he did not think America had been then inhabited from more than one to two thousand years. "Si recte mentem Acostæ capio, vult haud supra mille aut ad summum duo millia annorum Americam habitari coepisse." To this opinion, however, De Laet dissents, on the ground of the vast population which America shewed at the time of the Spanish invasion, and of the great number of languages and nations into which that population was divided. But the amount of the population at that time was evidently exaggerated; and