guages and those of north-eastern Asia on the one hand, and other writers shewing as decided analogies between some American and Polynesian languages on the other, all equally deserving of the fullest investigation.
From these considerations, then, it seems a natural consequence that the inhabitants of America did not all proceed from one only source, and that those opinions, therefore, are erroneous which are founded on that supposition. Other writers, as Garcia, De Laet, and Horn, who have pointed out a number of different countries and localities from which the first settlers might have come, as Horn says, rather than positively limiting them to a particular route, appear to me to hold corrector opinions.
The same kind of events that we see, even in our days, of frequent occurrence, and know to have been of frequent occurrence in history, we may reasonably conclude to nave been the universal rule with regard to man in the course of his migrations. When we see that there is scarcely an island in the ocean on which inhabitants have not been found, and frequently, in comparatively small islands, that two or more distinct tribes are found speaking distinct languages, those languages, as the Polynesian with its numberless dialects, often spread over immense areas, over which it is difficult, at first sight, to discover how they could have arrived at their respective localities, we see clearly still in operation the laws of migration by which the world has been peopled from the beginning. In one of the most recent works on the subject, Mr. Pickering's, the author traces two great routes of emigration from the East Indies into the main Pacific, at the same time that he indicates other modes by which the Polynesian Islands have become inhabited. (Chap. xvii.) Agreeing with him in his observations on these points, though not concurring in others, it appears to me that he might well have extended his conclusions further than he has done, and that the wandering tribes who had been so traced to those islands could equally well have been followed to the mainland of America. Even in our days we know of Japanese vessels, which had been engaged in commercial pursuits being driven by storms to the shores of America; and such occurrences have been reported to have occurred constantly in former times. In Ellis's "Polynesian Researches," in particular, many such cases are detailed. But besides peaceful pursuits, we may be sure that in every uncivilized stage of society the various stragglers who wandered over the ocean in search of abodes were often impelled by more numerous and more pressing motives. Uncivilized nations,
