mentioned by P. Martyr; and that their women wore a sort of buskin, or half-boot, made of cotton, which surrounded the small part of the leg, as worn by the women of various nations of Africa, but not by any other of America. He might also have noticed their use of the tomtom, or African drum, mentioned by Rochefort, formed from the hollow trunk of a tree, and covered only at one end, like our kettle-drums, and other African musical instruments, such as gourds filled with pebbles or small peas for rattles, and one made of gourds, on which they placed a cord formed of the string of a reed, which they called Pite, together with the inordinate love of dancing, characteristic of Africans beyond the customary dances of the other Americans.
Impressed with the conviction of the Caribs being of African descent, Bryan Edwards finally turned to their language, and, as he says, by the help of a friend, collected fourteen words, or phrases to which they fancied they found their coincidents in Hebrew. Had this really been satisfactorily done he might have reasonably set them down as Jews; but having gone carefully over the list, I cannot find more than one or two words they have selected that bear any resemblance, as they allege, and those few so slight as to deserve no further notice of the supposed analogy. His proper course would have been to compare the words given in Le Breton's Dictionary, or Rochefort's Vocabulary, with those of various African languages, so as to trace, if he could, any satisfactory resemblance between them, and shew the former to have been derived from the latter. In accordance with the theory suggested before as to the best means of shewing the descent of the various American tribes from their original abodes in Asia or Polynesia, I felt myself possessed of a great advantage for this purpose in the well arranged vocabulary compiled for the use of the Niger expedition, with the still more able and elaborate dissertation on the African languages by Dr. Latham, in the Transactions of the British Association for 1847. Supposing the Caribs to have come over from Africa, as they must have done, according to this hypothesis, about 400 years since, and considering the changes which must be calculated on as taking place in all languages in such a long space of time, it is impossible for us to expect that any very extended comparisons can be made, especially in the case of savage nations subject to so many mutations. The only wonder is, that any allowable analogies at all can be pointed out after such a lapse of time, and the satisfaction will be, therefore, proportionate, if we can shew coincidences as great, and as many, as have
