32 EEADE ON BASQUES 



This song was discovered, it is said, in 1590, by Ibanez de Ibargueu, and first publish- 

 ed in ISl'T by W. von Humboldt iu " Mithridates." M. Jules Vinson does not believe that 

 the song above translated is of au earlier date than the sixteenth century. The earliest 

 extant specimens of the Basque language do not, iu his opinion, take us further back than 

 the fifteenth century. In poetic merit the foregoing effusion may be compared with 

 some of the songs iu Dr. Brinton's " Ancient Nahuatl Poetry." It might also be matched 

 by productions attributed to our own Northern Indians. "Whether such productions are 

 the unaided offspring of the aboriginal muse, I cannot affirm with confidence. 



I have already cited certain hints rather than express assertions to the intent that 

 some of the latter and the Basque may have descended from common forefathers. Such a 

 theory implies either intercourse iu remote times between both sides of the Atlantic or 

 some catastrophe such as that of which the Atlantis legend is supposed to preserve the 

 tradition. Prof. Alexander Winchell, in his remarkable work, " Preadamites," would 

 uphold the existence in prehistoric ages, not merely of Atlantis, but of a still more primitive 

 continent in the Indian Ocean. His hypothesis is that the original abode of mankind 

 was a region covering the site of the islands of Mauritius and Reunion and the surround- 

 ing waters, to which has been given the imaginary name of " Lemuria." If we were 

 disposed to be satirical, we might attribute this name to the ghostly and unsubstantial 

 nature of the theory which invented it. It is, however, not in Roman mythology, but 

 in zoology that we must look for its derivation. The Lemuridte, a group of lowly 

 organized and very ancient creatures — though still discoverable over a wide area — exist 

 nowhere else in so great abundance as in the island of Madagascar. On this fact and on 

 certain pecularities in the bird fauna of that island. Dr. Hartlaub and other naturalists 

 have based the theory of a Lemurian continent. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, though he 

 does not recognize the necessity for such a continent, admits the possibility of the former 

 existence of several large islands between Madagascar and India. Prof. Winchell, however, 

 accepts Lemuria as, at least, probable, and in his chart of the gradual dispersion of man- 

 kind, he makes it his starting-point. One branch of the prehistoric pre-Mongoloids he 

 supposes to have traversed Northern Africa as far as the ocean, where a portion of it 

 crossed into Europe by what was then au isthmus. They found a paradisiacal peninsula 

 south of the Pyrenees and retained it long as a favorite centre of population, founding there 

 an " Iberian Empire." The remainder of those Mongolians made their way to Atlantis, 

 to the actual existence of which, Dr. Winchell says, recent explorations, including the 

 soundings of the Challenger, the Gettysburg and the Gazelle, representing England, the 

 United States and Germany, respectively, have given substance and reality. " During 

 the historic period ", writes Prof. Winchell, " the isolated Canaries have stood as the only 

 inhabited remnants of Atlantis ; and the detached and degenerate Guauches, when at 

 length rediscovered, complained : ' God placed us on these islands and then forsook and 

 forgot us.' " Two years after the publication of " Preadamites " appeared Mr. Ignatius 

 Donelly's " Atlantis : the Antediluvian world " a work whose sweeping statements and 

 wild comparisons of uurelated races and languages have tended, among men of science, 

 to discredit rather than to commend the theory. At the same time, it revived discussion 

 on a question which many persons had imagined to be set at rest for ever, and elicited 

 from various pens whatever could be said on one side or the other in the controversy. 

 Shortly before its appearance, Mr. R. W. Boodle, in the Educational Record of the Province 



