Page:The Conquest of Mexico Volume 2.djvu/467

 Page 379 (1).—Ante, vol. i. p. 146.

Page 379 (2).—He dispensed a thousand ducats every year in his ordinary charities, according to Gomara.

Page 380 (1).—Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 203.

Page 383 (1).—The names of many animals in the New World, indeed, have been frequently borrowed from the Old: but the species are very different. "When the Spaniards landed in America," says an eminent naturalist, "they did not find a single animal they were acquainted with; not one of the quadrupeds of Europe, Asia, or Africa."—Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London, 1819), p. 250.

Page 383 (2).—Acosta, lib. i, cap. 16.

Page 383 (3).—Count Carli shows much ingenuity and learning in support of the famous Egyptian tradition, recorded by Plato, in his "Timæus,"—of the good faith of which the Italian philosopher nothing doubts.—Lettres Améric, tom. ii. let. 36-39.

Page 384 (1).—Garcia, Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid, 1729), cap. 4.

Page 384 (2).—Torquemada, Monarch. Ind., lib. 1, cap. 8.

Page 384 (3).—Pritchard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London, 1826), vol. i. p. 81 et seq. He may find an orthodox authority of respectable antiquity, for a similar hypothesis, in St. Augustine, who plainly intimates his belief, that, "as by God's command, at the time of the creation, the earth brought forth the living creature after his kind, so a similar process must have taken place after the deluge, in islands too remote to be reached by animals from the continent."—De Civitate Dei, ap. Opera (Parisiis, 1636), tom. v. p. 987.

Page 384 (4).—Beechey, Voyage to the Pacific and Behring's Strait (London, 1831), Part 2, Appendix.—Humboldt, Examen Critique de I'Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau Continent (Paris, 1837), tom. ii. p. 58.

Page 384 (5).—Whatever scepticism may have been entertained as to the visit of the Northmen, in the eleventh century, to the coasts of the great continent, it is probably set at rest in the minds of most scholars, since the publication of the original documents, by the Royal Society at Copenhagen. (See, in particular, Antiquitates Americanse, Hafnise, 1837, pp. 79-200.) How far south they penetrated is not so easily settled.

Page 384 (6).—The most remarkable example, probably, of a direct intercourse between remote points, is furnished us by Captain Cook, who found the inhabitants of New Zealand not only with the same religion, but speaking the same language, as the people of Otaheite, distant more than 2000 miles. The comparison of the two vocabularies establishes the fact.—Cook's Voyages (Dublin, 1784), vol. i. book i., chap. 8.

Page 384 (7).—The eloquent Lyell closes an enumeration of some extraordinary and well attested instances of this kind with remarking, "Were the whole of mankind now cut off, with the exception of one family, inhabiting the old or new continent, or Australia, or even some coral islet of the Pacific, we should expect their descendants, though they should never become more enlightened than the South-Sea Islanders or the Esquimaux, to spread, in the course of ages, over the whole earth, diffused partly by the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence in a limited district, and partly by the accidental drifting of canoes by tides and currents to distant shores."—Principles of Geology (London, 1832), vol. ii. p. 121.