But Acosta felt the need of a land route to take care of the animals. Noah had let them out of the Ark in western Asia, and they could hardly be expected to sail or even to swim to America. And so Acosta ventured the opinion that somewhere in the north explorers would ultimately find a portion of America that joined with some corner of the Old World, or at any rate was “not altogether severed and disjoined” from it. In this way the animals—and man—had come to the New World. [Illustration: OUT OF NOAH’S ARK AND OVER BERING STRAIT _Two pages from Brerewood’s seventeenth-century book_ Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions, Through the Chief Parts of the World, _in which he pictures bears and Tartars crossing to the New World at a point where Asia and America “are continent one with the other, or at most, disioyned but by some narrow channell of the Ocean.” (Courtesy of the University of California, Los Angeles, Library_.)] God-fearing Protestants from England joined clerics of the Roman church in bringing the American aborigine over from Asia. Long before any white man had stared across Bering Strait from the eastern tip of Asia and discovered Alaska, sixteenth and seventeenth century men were envisioning the neighborliness of the two continents and an easy crossing. It had to be. There was no escaping this solution. Men from Eden could be trusted to force their way across the widest and wildest of oceans, but not animals from Ararat. In 1614 Edward Brerewood worried, like Father de Acosta, over the problem of “the ravenous and harmefull beasts, wherewith _America_ is stored, as Beares, Lions, Tigers, Wolves, Foxes, &c. (which men as is likely, would never to their owne harme transport out of the one continent to the other).” He saw that “from _Noahs_ Ark, which rested after the deluge, in _Asia_, all those beasts must of necessity fetch their beginning.” He knew that the men must have come from Asia because the Indians were not the color of Africans, and they had “no rellish nor resemblance at all, of the Artes, or learning, or civility of _Europe_.” Also, “the West side of _America_ respecting _Asia_, is exceeding much better peopled then the opposite or East side, that respecteth toward Europe.” Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents Brerewood moved on from the questions of how and whence to who. With considerable hardihood, this learned Englishman picked a single Asiatic race to supply the Indian with a forebear. Looking askance at the inhabitants of America, he wrote: “In their grosse ignorance of letters, and of arts, in their idolatrie, and the specialties of it, in their incivility, and many barbarous properties, they resemble the old and rude Tartars, above all the nations of the earth.”[3]