134 Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute [vol. x. 



the Atlantis of old authors , which he supposes to have formerly united 

 Western Europe to Greenland and Labrador — a supposition which was 

 shared by Brinton — and Behring Straits or the Aleutian islands. This 

 hypothesis, he claims, explains the long-headed tribes of the East and 

 the Mongoloid peoples of the West.^ 



Louis Figuier is not so positive in his Human Race. He frankly 

 admits that, in his estimation, "the original race which has peopled 

 the Western Hemisphere is almost impossible to be traced".^ This 

 is practically the opinion of Father Venegas in his work on early Cali- 

 fornia which is now almost a classic.^ 



Other authors favoured the supposition of a Scandinavian immigra- 

 tion to America, and some investigators have even seen in particular 

 tribes of that continent descendants of the W^elsh, the Scotch and the 

 Irish, while others trace them to the Canaanites of old! 



The Welsh origin of some American tribes is derived from the declar- 

 ations of supposedly veracious travellers, like, for instance, a Capt. 

 Isaac Stuart who, in 1782, asserted that he had, in company with a 

 Welshman named John Davey, fallen in with a tribe of Indians of 

 rather white complexion, whose habitat was the valley of a small river 

 which emptied itself into the Red River, and whose language his com- 

 panion understood without having ever learned it. According to said 

 Capt. Stuart, those Indians claimed that their ancestors had come 

 from a foreign country and landed on what is now called West Florida. 

 They showed, he says, as evidence of their contention rolls of parchment 

 the characters of which Stuart could not read, any more than his Welsh 

 companion who was perfectly illiterate. 



Other so-called white races have been reported found "a very con- 

 siderable distance from New Orleans, whose inhabitants were of different 

 complexions, not so tawny as those of the other Indians and who spoke 

 Welsh".* But no such Indians are known to exist in our times, and 

 the presumption is that those above referred to are not any more real 

 than the various nations and personages mentioned in the Book of 

 Mormon, despite the fact that the famous Indian artist Catlin would 

 fain see in the now extinct Mandans a Welsh colony established by 

 Prince Madoc.^ 



^"Ethnology", p. 362; Cambridge, 1909. 

 ^ Op. cit., p. 406; London, 1872. 



' "History of California", p. 60, first published in Spanish at Madrid in 1758. 

 * S. G. Drake, "The Aboriginal Races of North America", p. 53; New York, 1880. 

 ^ "Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North Ameri- 

 can Indians", Vol. II, Appendix A; Philadelphia, 1859. 



