e astrologers and star-gazers, and
draw no small part of their mythology from the skies. They fast to
obtain the favor of the Deity, and they feast, at the return of the
first fruits. They have concentrated the wisdom and fancy of their
forefathers and sages, in allegories and fables. With the Arabs, they
are gifted in the relation of fictitious domestic tales, in which
necromancy and genii, constitute the machinery of thought. With the
ancient Mesopotamians, Persians and Copts, they practice the old art of
ideographic, or picture writing. They are excellent local geographers,
and practical naturalists. There is not an animal, fish, insect or
reptile in America, whose character and habitudes they do not
accurately and practically know. They believe the earth to be a plain,
with four corners, and the sky a hemisphere of material substance-like
brass, or metal, through which the planets shine, and around which the
sun and moon revolve. Over all, they install the power of an original
Deity, who is called the Great Spirit, who is worshipped by fire, who
is invoked by prayer, and who is regarded, from the cliffs of the
Monadnock,[14] to the waters of the Nebraska,[15] as omnipotent,
immaterial, and omnipresent.

[14] A mountain in New Hampshire, seen from the sea.

[15] The Indian name of the river La Plate.

That this race has dwelt on the continent long centuries before the
Christian era, all facts testify. If they are not older as a people,
than most of the present nations on the Asiatic shores of the Indian
ocean, as has been suggested, they are certainly anterior in age, to
the various groups of the Polynesian islands. They have, it is
apprehended, taken the impress of their character and mental ideocracy
from the early tribes of Western Asia, which was originally peopled, to
a great extent, by the descendants of Shem. These fierce tribes crowded
each other, as one political wave trenches on another, till they have
apparently traversed its utmost bounds. How they have effected the
traject here, and by what process, or contingency, are merely curious
questions, and can never be satisfactorily answered. The theory of a
migration by Behring's straits, is untenable. If we could find adequate
motives for men to cross thence, we cannot deduce the tropical animals.
We cannot erect a history from materials so slender. It may yield one
element of population; but we require the origin of many. But while we
seek for