118 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



the excavations of igneous exhaustion. The population was 

 once unquestionably organized in a social state; it may have 

 been a kind of Austral Pelasgian people, distinct from the pres- 

 ent Jacalvas Biagoos, or Sea Gypsies, who always live on the 

 water ; but that one has wandered, as navigators and workers 

 in stone, across the whole breadth of the South Seas, is proved 

 by the monuments left on the islands above-mentioned, not- 

 withstanding the great distance they are asunder; perhaps the 

 builders of the great pyramids in some of the Australasian 

 islands, — again repeated, under the name of Morais, in many 

 of the South Sea groups, — the same who ultimately passed 

 to the west coast of America, and introduced similar structures 

 at Cholula and many other places; models upon which the 

 indigenous civilization of the New World was based and pro- 

 gressing, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of international wars 

 and conquests, until the arrival of the Spaniards laid the 

 whole western fabric in the dust.* 



ARCTIC ASIA. 



Behrixg's Strait is generally of a trifling depth, scarcely 

 forty miles wide, having several denudated and abraded 

 islands intervening; and the coasts, in many parts, composed 

 more of frozen earth than solid rock. As the water, with 

 several shoals, is floored with fossil bones and shells, and there 

 being no river of importance on either shore of the continents, 

 or near, on the Arctic side, no great pressure can have come 

 from the polar ocean; and, consequently, no great opening, if 

 any, until the Arctic rising of Asia and Europe altered the 

 relative conditions of th : 3 two seas. That once there was no 

 current, may be inferred from the islands of New Siberia, and 

 the vicinity being in part composed of ice, mixed with mammoth 

 bones, tusks, ani other organic remains; and the presence of 



* See Addenda. 



