des hunting and fishing, and whose ideas and manners differed
widely from those of the "red men" of the North. Ruined cities, defaced
temples, broken statues,--relics such as on the Eastern Continent, from
the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of the Ganges, mark the sites of
fallen empires and extinct civilizations,--relics such as we should have
expected, from _a priori_ reasoning, to meet with in the corresponding
latitudes of the New World,--lie scattered through their whole extent,
proclaiming themselves the works of men who lived in settled communities
and under regular forms of government, who had some knowledge of
architecture and some rude notions of the beautiful and the sublime, who
had strong feelings and vivid conceptions in regard to the agency of
supernal powers in the control of human affairs, but who clothed their
conceptions in uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd
and debasing rites. Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson,
on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his
estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he cannot treat them, according
to his usual method in such cases, as fabrications of Spanish priests
and lying chroniclers. How, then, does he account for them? He unfolds
a theory on the subject, which he has stolen from the "monkish
chroniclers" whom he treats with so much contempt, and which has long
ago been exploded and set aside. He tells us, that these relics have no
connection with the history of the American Aborigines,--that they have
a different origin and a far greater antiquity,--that they are proofs,
not to be gainsaid, of the discovery of this continent, at a very early
date, by Phoenician adventurers, and of the establishment, in the
regions where they are found, of Phoenician colonies. These ruins, he
tells us, were Phoenician temples, these statues are the representations
of Phoenician gods. In the comparison of facts by which he endeavors to
support this theory, we have been surprised to find him admitting
the testimony of other explorers. But they are, it seems, reluctant
witnesses. Their inferences from the facts which they have themselves
collected are directly opposite to his. "Proving our case," he says, "by
such testimony, we have admitted their statement of fact, only rejecting
their conclusions." Their proper business, it would appear, was to
amass the materials which our author alone was competent to use. He
encountered