1914] Northwestern Denes and Northeastern Asiatics 133 



As to the Tatars, Thomas Morton, who wrote as early as 1637, 

 was just as sure that they could not have been the parents of the abori- 

 ginal Americans, though a John Josselyn, whose book was published 

 the following year, unhesitatingly declared that the speech of the 

 Mohawks is "a dialect of the Tartars".^ 



Nor have the Carthaginians been overlooked. They found doughty 

 champions in the persons of a number of monks and ecclesiastics re- 

 markable more for their erudition than for their judgment, no less 

 than in writers of a more popular character. 



Most of the authors who have upheld such an origin for the American 

 Indians have found it necessary to use as a prop for their rather fragile 

 theory the famous Atlantis thesis, which predicates the existence in 

 ages long past of a huge island or continent lying between Europe and 

 America. Such superior minds as Sir Daniel Wilson and the celebrated 

 Brasseur de Bourbourg partially or wholly believed in that more or 

 less mythical land. 



On the ground of their languages the American aborigines were 

 compared by Barton and Vater with the Mantchous, the Tungus, the 

 Mongols and the Samoyeds, while other elements in their speech would 

 lead the same authors to refer them to the Celts and — save the mark ! — 

 the natives of the Congo. ^ 



According to Malte-Brun the original inhabitants of Greenland 

 and Chile must belong with the Finnish, Ostiack, Permian and Cau- 

 casian families, while some of those of Mexico are allied to the Japanese, 

 the Chinese and the Kourilians; which does not prevent others from 

 being related to the Tungus, the Mantchous, and the Mongols.^ Another 

 writer of less renown, Siebold, attempted to connect through their 

 vocabularies the Japanese and the Moscas, or Muyscas, a large aboriginal 

 nation in Latin America.'* 



On the other hand, the late Dr. Brinton believed that "the ancestors 

 of the American race could have come from no other quarter than 

 Western Europe, or that portion of Eurafrica which he . . . described 

 as the most probable location of the birth-place of the species".^ 



A. H. Keane formally admits of two routes as having been followed 

 by the immigrants to America, namely some kind of a continent, not 



* Voyages, p. 124. 



2 Untersuchung uher Amerikas Bevolkerung aus dent alien Continenie. Leipzig, 1810; 

 Mithrid, p. 340. 



* Vide Wiseman, "Twelve Lectures", pp. 80-81. 



* Memoire relatif d, VOrigine des Japonais; in Nouveau Journal Asiatique,juin, 1829, 

 p. 400. 



* "The American Race", p. 32; Philadelphia, 1901. 



