GOSSIP THE AFFINITY OF RACES. 295 



coast." Many other instances might be adduced, of much more 

 modern date, of accidental arrivals at the Western Continent. 



Taken as sufficient evidence that the ancient Egyptians, Phoeni- 

 cians, Jews, and probably a good sprinkling of the people of Asia 

 Minor, including the Greeks, became acquainted either as mariners 

 or merchants, with the western coast of Africa, and even with the 

 Azores and Canaries, yet these accounts go no further, and all else 

 is supposition. There is nothing on record except the apochryphal 

 Ophir, (which some have assumed to be apart of Central America,) 

 from whence Solomon imported gold and silver and ivory, apes 

 and peacocks, to suggest a probability that his or any other navy 

 of the period or previously, either by accident or design, touched at 

 this continent. Yet it is difficult to account for the civilization 

 that prevailed in Central America, so analogous to the ancient 

 civilization of the Eastern hemisphere, except that accident may 

 have thrown some of those ships on the coast, from which they 

 would find it impossible to return whence they came, and where 

 their crews remained to communicate so much of the arts of civiliz- 

 ation as they themselves were acquainted with, and thus to form 

 the basis of, or to give an impulse to that which existed at the time 

 of the modern discovery of the continent. 



The Caribs had many customs and observances which seemed 

 to connect them with such an ancestry, without possessing that 

 degree of civilization which might be expected to accompany it. 

 Even their language has been quoted and compared with the Phoe- 

 nician and Hebrew, in proof of their oriental derivation. None of 

 these, however, are conclusive tests. They do indeed carry them 

 back to an antiquity far more remote than those nations, and may 

 be adduced in favour of their being derived from one family, in 

 which respect they were only on an equal footing with the whole 

 American race. The historian Edwards, to whose work I have fre- 

 quently alluded, with reference to their language, says, " It is scarcely 

 possible to doubt that the following words used by the Charaibes, 

 had their origin in the Old Hemisphere. [Examples on the black 

 board, but cannot be quoted here for want of oriental type — see 

 Edwards' History.] It may also be observed, that Dawson in his 

 Acadian Geology, a chapter of which is devoted to prehistoric man, 



