The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these distant regions.” Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency, of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the _Punic_ was changed into a _Runic_ inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates are not quite so legible.