ON THE ORiaiN AND MIGEATIONS OF THE POLYNESIAN NATION. 53 



based upon a more reasonable and logical foundation than any 

 other."* But in so far as the emigration from Eastern Asia is 

 supposed to have taken place by Behring's Straits or the Alieutian 

 Islands, the objection taken to such a theory by the Quarterly 

 Eieview (vol. xxi., pp. 334-5), is unanswerable : " We can hardly 

 suppose that any of the pastoral hordes of Tartars would emi- 

 grate across the strait of Behring or the Alieutian Islands with- 

 out carrying with them a supply of those cattle on which their 

 whole subsistence depended." To suppose indeed that a people 

 like the Tartars of North-eastern Asia, who live, so to speak, on 

 horseback, and subsist almost entirely on the flesh and milk of 

 their flocks and herds, would cross that narrow strait, either by 

 water or on the ice when frozen, without carrying with them a 

 single horse, a single sheep, or a single head of cattle, is quite 

 incredible. And to talk of an extensive emigration of the Tar- 

 tar nations of North-eastern Asia flying to America from before 

 the warlike hosts of Zenghis Khan, how could a non-maritime 

 people have crossed the intervening tract of ocean between Asia 

 and America ? or if they did, how did they come to leave all their 

 sheep, cattle, and horses behind ? But if America was first peo- 

 pled, as I have supposed, by a handful of famished Polynesians, 

 who had been suddenly driven to sea from Easter Island, and 

 carried across the intervening ocean to America, somewhere near 

 Copiapo in the State of Chili, in South America, the entire 

 absence of all our domestic animals at the era of the Spanish 

 conquest was the necessary consequence of the manner in which 

 they had originally reached their new-found-land. 



" Analogies," says Mr. Bancroft, "have been found, or thought 

 to exist between the languages of several of the American tribes 

 and that of the Chinese ; but it is to Mexico, Central America, 

 and Peru, and not to the north-western coast, where we should 

 naturally expect to find them most evident."t Besides, in the im- 

 portant item of architecture, in which we should have expected 

 some proofs of identity between the Chinese and the Polynesians, 

 if there had been any original affinity between these nations, 

 there is none whatever. Speaking of the ruins of Central 

 America, Stephens says : " If their (the Chinese) ancient archi- 

 tecture is the same with their modern, it bears no resemblance 

 whatever to these unknown ruins." Central America, vol. ii. 

 p. 438. 



It would be a mere waste of time to take into serious consider- 

 ation the'claims which Mr. Bancroft shows us have been put forth 

 by various writers to the discovery and settlement of America on 

 behalf of the Egyptians, the Phoenicians or Tyrians, and the Car- 

 thaginians. It would be inexcusable, however, to omit all men- 



* The native races of the Pacific States of North America, vol. i, p. 30. 

 t Bancroft. Ibid. 



