VAGARIES. 41 



Davis in the preparation of their memoir. A list of seats of ancient population in 

 North America, ascertained by him, is attached to his "Annals," of which he says, 

 that out of 541, 393 are in Kentucky; and of 1830 monuments observed by him, 

 505 are in the same State. In 183G, he commenced at Philadelphia, the publication 

 of " A General History, Ancient and Modern, of the Earth and Mankind in the 

 Western Hemisphere; including the philosophy of American History, the Annals, 

 Traditions, Civilization, Languages, &c, of all the American Nations, Tribes, Empires, 

 and States." It was to be comprised in twelve volumes, of 300 pages each, and was 

 dedicated to the Society of Geography of Paris, as a homage due to the public 

 approbation given by that body to his first analogous labor, a series of researches 

 on the origin of mankind. 



Two volumes only, it is believed, were printed, which are far from being intelli- 

 gible to a common capacity, or to ordinary erudition. 1 



With the productions of Haywood and Rafinesque, may be associated that of 

 Josiah Priest, upon " American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West," published 

 in 1 833. We are informed, in the title page of the fifth edition of this book, that 

 twenty-two thousand copies had been printed within thirt} 7 months, for subscribers 

 only. It must therefore have had a wide "circulation, and perhaps a corresponding 

 degree of influence on the opinions of certain classes of readers. It is a collection 

 of odds and ends of theories and statements, relating, more or less directly, to 

 American antiquities, many of them derived from Rafinesque — a sort of curiosity- 

 shop of archaeological fragments, whose materials are gathered without the exercise 

 of much discrimination, and disposed without much system or classification, and 

 apparently without inquiry into their authenticity. It is not strange that references 

 should sometimes be rather confused, and labels be occasionally misplaced. It must 

 be in some such way that Prof. Horn, whose treatise " De Originibus Americanis" 

 we have had occasion to mention, comes to be represented as "a son of Theodosius 

 the Great, Emperor of the West, who lived in the third century !" 2 



To return from these eccentricities to the period of Mr. Atwater's publication, 



1 Mr. Rafinesque was a laborious student in almost every conceivable department of knowledge, and 

 only wanted the faculty of judicious discrimination to secure him a distinguished name among men of 

 science. He was of foreign birth, and had been a resident in Sicily, and first travelled in the United 

 States in 1802, 1803, and 1804. Before 1815, he had published a very considerable number of treatises, 

 chiefly upon natural history, from observations in this country and in Sicily, with others of a more general 

 character. In 1815, he returned to America, and had the misfortune to be shipwrecked on the coast; 

 losing, according to his own statement, all his "books, manuscripts, plates, drawings, maps, herbarium, 

 collections, minerals, &c, the fruit of twenty years' labors, exertions, and travels." Some of his lost 

 MSS. on botany, zoology, mineralogy, &c, he undertook to re-write, and endeavored to obtain sub- 

 scriptions for their publication here. In 1838, he printed an essay introductory to a proposed work, to 

 be entitled " Researches on the Antiquities and Monuments of North and South America." He died 

 at Philadelphia, in 1840. 



3 Rafinesque, who did not relish the use made of his own theories, charged Priest with asserting that 

 Noah's ark rested in America, and that he had three sons — one white, one red, and one black ! This 

 statement does not appear to be quite correct, unless Mr. Priest's expressions were modified in the later 

 editions of his work. 

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