[354] Garcia, Orígen de los Indios de el nuevo Mundo (Madrid, 1729), cap. 4. [355] Torquemada, Monarch. Ind., lib. 1, cap. 8. [356] Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London, 1826), vol. i. p. 81, et seq.--He may find an orthodox authority of respectable antiquity, for a similar hypothesis, in St. Augustine, who plainly intimates his belief that, “as by God’s command, at the time of the creation, the earth brought forth the living creature after his kind, so a similar process must have taken place after the deluge, in islands too remote to be reached by animals from the continent.” De Civitate Dei, ap. Opera (Parisiis, 1636), tom. v. p. 987. [357] Beechey, Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait (London, 1831), Part 2, Appendix.--Humboldt, Examen critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau-Continent (Paris, 1837), tom. ii. p. 58. [358] Whatever skepticism may have been entertained as to the visit of the Northmen, in the eleventh century, to the coasts of the great continent, it is probably set at rest in the minds of most scholars since the publication of the original documents by the Royal Society at Copenhagen. (See, in particular, Antiquitates Americanæ (Hafniæ, 1837), pp. 79-200.) How far south they penetrated is not so easily settled. [359] The most remarkable example, probably, of a direct intercourse between remote points is furnished us by Captain Cook, who found the inhabitants of New Zealand not only with the same religion, but speaking the same language, as the people of Otaheite, distant more than 2000 miles. The comparison of the two vocabularies establishes the fact. Cook’s Voyages (Dublin, 1784), vol. i. book 1, chap. 8. [360] The eloquent Lyell closes an enumeration of some extraordinary and well-attested instances of this kind with remarking, “Were the whole of mankind now cut off, with the exception of one family, inhabiting the old or new continent, or Australia, or even some coral islet of the Pacific, we should expect their descendants, though they should never become more enlightened than the South Sea Islanders or the Esquimaux, to spread, in the course of ages, over the whole earth, diffused partly by the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence in a limited district, and partly by the accidental drifting of canoes by tides and currents to distant shores.” Principles of Geology (London, 1832), vol. ii. p. 121. [361] “La question générale de la première origine des habitans d’un continent est au-delà des limites prescrites à l’histoire; peut-être même n’est-elle pas une question philosophique.” Humboldt, Essai politique, tom. i. p. 349. [362] _Ante_, p. 75.