History.—We propose to glance at this under the three heads of aboriginal ages, discovery, and colonization.
As to the Aboriginal Ages, there arises a question, too interesting to be overlooked, and vet too doubtful to be solved, as to the origin of the native tribes and peoples of A. 'Without prejudicing the question (which will be considered under INDIANS) whether the aboriginal inhabitants of A. are to be considered, iu an ethnological point of view, as sub stantially of one stock, it appears highly probable that they did not all spring from one and the same primeval band of adventurers; in other words, that different colonies, volun tary or involuntary, must have reached the new continent at different times. This view, to say nothing of the direct testimony of local traditions, seems to be in itself more than probable, when we consider that, through the length and breadth of the universal ocean, even the most insignificant specks of land had each received, at least, one influx of human wanderers. But, beyond such probabilities, and such traditions, the view in question is strengthened by facts, which it is difficult otherwise to explain—by diversities of lan guage, by different degrees, or kinds, of civilization, and, above all, by monuments, architectural or otherwise, of defunct races of by-gone clays. On this supposition, whence came the successive shoals of invaders? To this question no direct answer can be given. 'We can only scan the various routes by which, previously to what we call the discovery of A., the old world was most likely to people the American continent. To begin with the natural routes on the side of the Pacific—Behring's strait, the Aleutian isles, and the Polynesian archipelagoes—we can hardly conceive anything but barbarism having been conducted to A. by any one of them. The country which stretches back from Behring's strait to the Kolyma, may he asserted to be, without exception, the most inhospitable portion even of Siberia; and, moreover, the strait itself has more probably been a channel of migration from America than from Asia, the Tchuktchi of the latter regarding' them selves rather as a branch than as the stem of the Tchuktchi of the former. With respect, again, both to the Aleutian isles and the Polynesian archipelagoes, the successive step ping-stones in either series, instead of being presumed to have been so many halts for Asiatic Columbuses and Magellans, must rather be viewed as each a mother-country to a new colony, as each a point of departure for a fresh swarm. Thus would the ever aggra
vating blight of isolation—exemplified even in the old world among the Laplanders, the Iaintchtulales, and the Hottentots—prepare at each remove a deeper and deeper barbarism to land at last on the western shores of A. Further, if civilization, as certainly appears to have been the case, ever did find its way to A., it must have come directly and imme diately from the old world, and that under circumstances and conditions of by no means a favorable character. In remote times, such accidental, or, to speak more correctly, unintentional visits of Europeans and Asiatics may have occurred, as we know to have actually taken place in more modern days. Japanese junks have repeatedly been driven, by stress of weather, across the Pacific to the new world; and again, on the Atlantic, the easterly trades, within eight years after Columbus's earliest voyage, wafted the uncon scious Portuguese to Brazil, during their second voyage to India—the very first, in fact, which they had attempted by steering clear of the headlands of Africa. Such incidents, however frequently they might have happened, were much more likely to civilize exist ing communities than to found hew ones; and it is at least a curious fact, that the only aboriginal nations which could be regarded as in any sense civilized at the date of the Spanish conquest, pointed in their traditions to such events as we have endeavored to describe. Mexico and Peru had each had its Cecrops, or semi-divine civilizer—the for mer referring him to the east, across the Atlantic, and the latter to the west, across the Pacific. How far such hypotheses may account for the admitted facts, we arc not left altogether to conjecture. Isolated individuals of our own nation have enabled us to bring the light of the present to bear on the past. When we consider what William Adams achieved in Japan, 200 years ago, and what John To'ung and James Brooke have, more recently, effected in the Sandwich islands and in Borneo, we can perhaps more easily understand certain undeniable traces and traditions of aboriginal civilization.