THEORIES AND SPECULATIONS, 13 



credulity, who came to Brazil in 1555, charged with the establishment of a religious 

 colony, believed in the transatlantic migration of the Israelites. Gomara and de 

 Lery, with similar opportunities of observation, as already stated, made the Ameri- 

 cans to descend from the Canaanites. 



William Postel, an ingenious ethnological writer and oriental scholar, sometimes 

 called a visionary, 1 maintained that all North America was peopled from Mauritania. 

 He is the first who made a distinction between North and South America, sup- 

 posing them to have nothing in common in their origin. The Peruvians and Chili- 

 ans, he traced to the Gauls; in which conjecture he is sustained by Jaques Charron 

 author of a history of the Gauls. Paolo Giovio, an Italian historian of great repute, 

 imagined that the Mexicans derived from the Gauls their practice of human sacri- 

 fices. Edward Brerewood, an English antiquary of the sixteenth century, deduced 

 the whole population of the New World from the Tartars. Martin Hamkema 

 (Latinized Hamconius), and Suffrid Petri, two historians of Dutch Friseland, agreed 

 in deriving the occupants of Peru and Chili from the Frisians. Acosta and Garcia, 

 Jesuit Missionaries long in Spanish America, thought the country was peopled by 

 degrees, and from various sources. The former, deeming it not improbable that 

 vessels might, from time to time, have been cast upon these shores, inclined to credit 

 the story from Aristotle, of a Carthaginian ship driven far to the westward, which 

 discovered lands till then unknown, that might have been America. He was at a loss 

 to determine how animals were transported. Athanasius Kircher, a German mathe- 

 matician and antiquary, who wrote several works concerning Egypt, traced the 

 Americans to the Egyptians, and thought the Atlantis extended from the Canaries 

 to the Azores. Arius Montanus, a Spaniard very learned in Jewish antiquities, 

 Francis Vatable, and Gilbert Genebrard, both eminent professors of Hebrew, at 

 Paris, Anthony Possivin, a learned Jesuit of Mantua, and Martin Becan, a German 

 professor of theology and philosophy, concurred in the belief that the Ophir of 

 Solomon was in America. 



Among the most prominent of those who, at an early period, wrote expressly 

 upon the question of the origin of the American nations, are the learned Grotius, 

 the Flemish geographer John De Laet, and the Leyden Professor Horn. Grotius 

 supposed that the Isthmus of Panama was an impenetrable barrier between the two 

 divisions of the continent. With the exception of Yucatan and its neighborhood, 

 he makes the whole of North America to have been peopled by the Norwegians, 

 by way of Iceland, Greenland, Estotiland, &c, who were followed, some ages after, 

 by Danes, Swedes, and other German nations. He believes, with Peter Martyr, 

 that some Ethiopians, who were Christians, may have been cast on the shores of 

 Yucatan. He would derive the Indians of South America, near the Straits of 

 Magellan, from the Moluccas and Java. The Peruvians, he doubts not, are a 

 Chinese Colony. The Tartars, or Scythians, he excludes entirely. 



Upon the dissertation of Grotius, De Laet published a sharp criticism, and a warm 

 controversy arose between them. Having disposed of most of the theories of Grotius, 



1 " Celebre visionaire, et Pun des plus savants homines de son siecle." — Biog. Universclle. 



