ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 118 
The southern and south-eastern portions of China border upon the ocean, 
and if the earliest Chinese came from an opposite direction they must have 
reached their country by water. If so, it may account for their skilled boat. 
men, who have lived upon the water from time immemorial, and for the enor- 
mous fleets of junks, generally of large dimensions, which they possess. A 
taste early cultivated may have come down through many centuries. 
If we first seek for testimony from Chinese records, we find they ascribe 
their own origin to the southern portion of China. In order to ascertain how 
they could have reached there by sea, and the direction whence they probably 
came, we must study natural causes, and seek among winds and currents for 
the first natural distributing agents, whose influence on navigation has been 
but recently overcome by clipper ships and steamers of modern construction. 
The Pacific is a wide ocean to cross, and fair winds must have been relied 
upon, for muscles could never have paddled a direct course for such a dis- 
tance. Where, therefore, is the country, from which they could follow a fair, 
fixed wind in a straight course, and be brought to land upon the southern 
coast of China, where they claim to have originated? 
We find in the South Pacific, between the southern tropics and the equator, 
a perpetual trade wind blowing from the south-east. Towards the tropics, it 
blows more nearly from the south, hauling gradually into the eastward as it 
approaches the equator. This constant breeze would drive a vessel kept 
before the wind, from a point anywhere on the coast of Peru, about in the 
neighborhood of the Chin-cha Islands, by a slightly curved but almost direct 
line as far as the equator in the direct course for the coast of China. 
In the North Pacific Ocean, between the tropics and equator, the north-east 
trade wind exists, as the almost complementary counterpart of winds in 
the southern hemisphere, likewise blowing more northerly near its northern 
limit, and uniting in an almost due easterly wind near the equator. Thus 
the south-east and north-east trade winds meet, and frequently blow into each 
other along a parallel line, making a continuous fair wind, uniting them 
at the equator, and consequently forming an uninterrupted motive power, to 
their western limit. 
Now, if a large junk were started from the coast of Peru, near Central 
America, and kept off before these fair winds, there is a strong probability 
that in sixty days she would strike the southern coast of China, about where 
early Chinese traditions place the origin of their race. This evidence, of 
natural causes, apparently points to Peru as the possible home of the Chinese 
ancestral race. What has Peru to offer in support of such an hypothesis? 
In Heaviside’s ‘‘ American Antiquities,’’ published in 1868, we find that 
“some of the western tribes of Brazil are so like the Chinese in feature as to 
be almost identical.’’ There is thus a possibility shown, that the ancestry of 
China may have embarked in large vessels as emigrants, perhaps from the 
vicinity of the Chincha Islands; or proceeded with a large fleet, like the early 
Chinese expedition against Japan, or that of Julius Cesar against Britain, 
or the Welsh Prince Madog and his party—who sailed from Ireland, and 
landed in America A. D. 1170, and, in like manner, in the dateless antecedure 
of history, crossed from the neighborhood of Peru to the country now known 
Proo. Cau. Acad. Sor., Vol. VI.—8. 
