from another direction. He says "there is abundant reason to believe that America was originally peopled from Asia, not, as is generally believed, by way of the Aleutian islands as the entrance of Behring's Straits, but by way of the South-Sea islands and across the widest part of the Pacific Ocean" (p. 86). All these writers, I venture to suggest, are correct to a certain degree in their suppositions as to the localities from which migrations actually took place, but mistaken in supposing any one of them to have been so exclusively of the others.
The whole population of America, when discovered by Columbus, has been estimated at about forty millions. This I consider to have been a rather exaggerated estimate; but still, taking it as correct, if they had all proceeded from one only source, it appears to me almost impossible but that they must have been more intimately connected with one another by language, manners, and character, than the various divisions shewed them to have been in reality. Some writers, in the face of this difficulty, have endeavoured to maintain that the various languages of the different nations of America, though so apparently distinct, were yet all formed upon essentially the same basis; and with regard to their manners and character, as proofs of an identity of origin, have adduced a number of analogies, which, however, on examination will be found only such as are common to the whole race of mankind. To answer their purpose, they should have passed over those common analogies, and dwelt only on those found peculiarly in some families distinctly from others, constituting the real difference between them; and they should also have explained why some of the most remarkable peculiarities are found among different nations of America according to their localities, in which peculiarities the neighbouring nations do not in any way participate. In the same manner with regard to their languages: when they allege that these are all, in the American continent, of the same character and structure, they should have shown how, in these respects, they are different from the other languages of the world. This has mainly to be taken for granted upon their statements, with the exception of a fanciful theory of what Du Ponceau called Polysyntheticism, and Humboldt and others have termed Agglutination; but the vocabularies and grammatical structures of the languages given in the valuable Essays of the American Ethnological Society, and other works published on the subject of those languages, certainly do not shew any material difference between the structure of the native languages of America
