OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 609 



connection of this event with the Great Ireland of the Ice- 

 landic Saga. In like manner the race of Celto-Amerieans, 

 whom credulous travellers have professed to discover in many 

 parts of the United States, have also disappeared since the 

 establishment of an earnest and scientific ethnology, based not 

 on accidental similarities of sounds, but on grammatical forms 

 and organic structure.* 



* The statements which have been advanced from the time of Raleigh, 

 of natives of Virginia speaking pure Celtic; of the supposition of the 

 Gaelic salutation, hao, hid, iach, having been heard there; of Owen 

 Chapclain, in 1669, saving himself from the hands of the Tuscaroras, 

 who were about to scalp him, " because he addressed them in his native 

 Gaelic," have all been appended to the ninth book of my travels (Rela- 

 tion historique, t. iii. 1825, p. 159). These Tuscaroras of North Caro- 

 lina are now, however, distinctly recognised by linguistic investigations, 

 a.s an Iroquois tribe. See Albert Gallatin on Indian Tribes, in the 

 Archceologia Americana, vol ii. (1836), pp. 23 and 57. An extensive 

 catalogue of Tuscarora words is given by Catlin, one of the most 

 admirable observers of manners who ever lived amongst the aborigines 

 of America. He, however, is inclined to regard the rather fair, 

 And often blue-eyed, nation of the Tuscaroras, as a mixed people, 

 descended from the ancient Welsh, and from the original inhabitants of 

 the American continent. See his Letters and Notes on the Manners, 

 Customs, and Conditions, of the North American Indians, 1841, vol. i. 

 p. 207; vol. ii. pp. 259 and 262-265. Another catalogue of Tuscarora 

 words is to be found in my brother's manuscript notes respecting lan- 

 guages, in the Royal Library at Berlin. " As the structure of American 

 idioms appears remarkably strange to nations speaking the modern lan- 

 guages of Western Europe, and who readily suffer themselves to be 

 led away by some accidental analogies of sound, theologians have gene- 

 rally believed that they could trace an affinity with Hebrew, Spanish 

 colonists with the Basque, and the English or French settlers with 

 Gaelic, Erse, or the Bos Breton. I one day met on the coast of Peru a 

 Spanish naval officer and an English whaling captain, the former of 

 whom declared that he had heard Basque spoken at Tahiti, and the 

 other Gaelic, or Erse, at the Sandwich Islands." Humboldt, Voyage 

 aux Regions Equinodiales, Relat. hist., t. iii. 1825, p. 160. 



Although no connection of language has yet been proved, I by no 

 means wish to deny that the Basques and the people of Celtic origin 

 inhabiting Ireland and Wales, who were early engaged in fisheries on 

 the most remote coasts, may have been the constant rivals of the Scan- 

 dinavians in the northem parts of the Atlantic, and even that the Irish 

 preceded the Scandinavians in the Faroe Islands and in Iceland. It is 

 much to be desired that, in our days, when a sound and severe spirit of 

 criticism, devoid of a character of contempt, prevails, the old investiga- 

 tions of Powel and Richard Hakluyt (Voyages and Navigations, vol. 



2 B 



