sanguine; but all must at any rate agree that, as things are, the subject is in no position to be taken up and discussed with profit. The absurd theories which have been advanced and gravely defended by men of learning and acuteness respecting the origin of the Indian races are hardly worth even a passing reference. The culture of the more advanced communities has been irrefragably proved to be derived from Egypt, Phenicia, India, and nearly every other anciently civilized country of the Old World: the whole history of migration of the tribes themselves has been traced in detail over Behring's Straits, through the islands of the Pacific, and across the Atlantic; they have been identified with the Canaanites, whom Joshua and the Israelites exterminated; and, worst of all, with the ten Israelitish tribes deported from their own country by the sovereigns of Mesopotamia! When men sit down with minds crammed with scattering items of historical information, abounding prejudices, and teeming fancies, to the solution of questions respecting whose conditions they know nothing, there is no folly which they are not prepared to commit.
Our national duty and honour are peculiarly concerned in this matter of the study of aboriginal American languages, as the most fertile and important branch of American archæology. Europeans accuse us, with too much reason, of indifference and inefficiency with regard to preserving memorials of the races whom we have dispossessed and are dispossessing, and to promoting a thorough comprehension of their history. Indian scholars, and associations which devote themselves to gathering together and making public linguistic and other archæological materials for construction of the proper ethnology of the continent, are far rarer than they should be among us. Not a literary institution in our country has among its teachers one whose business it is to investigate the languages of our aboriginal populations, and to acquire and diffuse true knowledge respecting them and their history.[1] So much the more reason have we to be grateful to the few who are endeavouring to make up our de-
- ↑ This reproach, at least, is about to be removed, by the establishment of a chair of American archæology at Cambridge.
