He adds, "It may very well have been the same agency which transported to Mexico the art of bronze-making, the computation of time by periods of dogs and apes, the casting of nativity, and the playing of backgammon." Then, again, we have the theory of those, now indeed few in number, who hold that the present Indian inhabitants of America were a distinctly indigenous race. Lord Kaimes, in his _Sketches of the History of Man_, says, "I venture still further, which is to conjecture that America has not been peopled from any part of the Old World." Voltaire had preceded him in this line of argument, relying on ridicule rather than on reason. "The same persons that readily admit that the beavers of Canada are of Canadian origin, assert that the men must have come there in boats, and that Mexico must have been peopled by some of the descendants of Magog."[124] Missionaries of various sects have endeavoured to identify the Red man with the lost ten tribes. Adair conceived the language of the Southern Indians to be a corruption of Hebrew, and the Jesuit Lafitan, in his history of the savages of America, maintained that the Caribee language was radically Hebrew. Mr. John Josselyn,[125] in an account of the Mohawks, states that their language is a dialect of the Tartars, and Dr. Williamson, in his history of North Carolina, considers it can hardly be questioned that the Indians of South America are descended from a class of the Hindoos in the southern part of Asia. Amongst others, Captain Don Antonio del Rio, who described the ruins of an ancient city in Guatemala, believed that they were the relics of a civilization founded by Phœnician colonists who had crossed the Atlantic ocean; and yet another theory is propounded by Mr. Knox,[126] who considers the extinct Guanches, formerly inhabiting the Canary and Cape de Verde islands, to have closely resembled the Egyptians in certain particulars. He goes on to observe, "Now cross the Atlantic, and in a nearly parallel zone of the earth, or at least in one not far removed, we stumble all at once upon the ruined cities of Copan and Central America. To our astonishment, notwithstanding the breadth of the Atlantic, vestiges, of a nature not to be doubted, of a thoroughly Egyptian character reappear--hieroglyphics, monolithic temples, pyramids; who erected these monuments on the American continent? Perhaps at some remote period the continents were not so far apart, they might have been united, thus forming a zone or circle of the earth occupied by a pyramid-building people."