of Lord North’s Island. 209 
the same time to the phoce and to quadrupeds, to birds and to 
reptiles, —a fantastic creature, which the Deity has cast upon the 
globe, in order to overthrow, by its presence, all the systems of 
naturalists, and to confound the pride of the learned.” * 
To considerations like these, of general importance to the phi- 
losophical inquirer, we may add, (as I have remarked in another 
place, +) that our countrymen have a particular interest in this 
subject, from circumstances which it will not be out of place to 
allude to. 
One important group of the islands of the Pacific Ocean is an 
American discovery; I mean the group originally named, after their 
discoverer, Ingraham’s Islands, but which the discoverer himself 
called the Washington Islands, and which, with the Marquesas, 
form the Archipelago of Mendana, as it is now denominated by 
geographers. f 
Another intertropical group, the Sandwich Islands, long well 
known to every reader, has a particular claim to our attention on 
account of the American missionary establishment there, which 
was begun in the year 1819, by missionaries from Boston, and 
which, independently of the important objects of the mission, will, 
with its American and European population, now amounting to 
many hundred persons, be of incalculable importance to the United 
States in many respects. 
* See Cuvier’s “ Revolutions of the Globe,” p: 41, Amer. edit. ‘‘L’Uni- 
vers,’ Tom. I., Oceanie, pp. 3, 4. 
{ American Quarterly Review for September, 1836. 
f{ See the original account of this discovery, extracted from the journal of 
Captain Ingraham, of Boston, in Massachusetts, published in the “ Collections 
of the Massachusetts Historical Society,” Vol. I., p. 20; see, also, Vol. IV., 
p: 241, of the same work. 
