( H ) 



arm of the fea fourteen leagues in breadth. Laftly ? 

 he propofes his own opinion, which he feems to give 

 only by way of fimple conjecture. 



Is it, fays he, to be believed, that Noah, who 

 lived three hundred and fifty years after the Deluge* 

 ihould be ignorant that a great part of the world 

 Jay beyond the weftern ocean ; and if he did know 

 it, could be deftitute of means to people it ? Was 

 it more difficult to pafs from the Canaries to the 

 Azores, and from thence to Canada, or from the 

 Cape Verd iflands to Brazil, than from the Conti- 

 nent of Afia to Japan, or to other iflands {till more 

 remote ? On this occafion he relates, all that the 

 antients, and efpecially iElian and Plato, have faid 

 of thofe veftiges, which according to him ftill re- 

 mained in their time, with refpecl to the knowledge 

 of America. He fees nothing to hinder us from 

 faying, that the Hefperides of the ancients were the 

 fame with the iflands of the Antilles \ and he ex- 

 plains the fable of the Dragon, which according to 

 the poets guarded the golden apples, to be the dif- 

 ferent flreights winding in a ferpent-Iike manner 

 round thofe iflands, and which the frequency of the 

 fhipwrecks might have caufed to be looked upon as 

 unnavigable. To this he adds many geographical 

 obfervationSj which are far from being altogether 

 exact, and which John de Laet very well refutes. 



The fame critick juftly remarks, that if the Ca- 

 naanites facrificed their children to their idols, we* 

 however, read in no place of the fcripture of their 

 being Anthropophagi. He acknowledges the pof- 

 fibility and probability of the paflage of men and 

 animals into America by the North ; and confefles^ 

 that it is eafy to conceive that men thus tranfplant- 

 ed into a defart and remote country ihould there 



becbme 



