It seems to me to have been principally in the north that the great migrations took place, and that they were undertaken by savage nations. The traditions borrowed by l’Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg from the sacred books of the Quichés, and those of the Delawares which have been preserved by Heckewelder, appear to me to offer much information on this point. By comparing the missionary’s narrative with some facts of Mexican history anterior to the conquest, I have been enabled to determine approximately the date of the arrival of the Red-Skins in the basin of the Missouri. It seems to me that we cannot refer it to an earlier date than the ninth, or at most the eighth, century. These traditions bring to light another and no less important fact: namely, that the Algonquins and Iroquois, after having crossed the valley of the Mississippi, from which they drove the people, whose singular monuments are now the object of study, had no more fighting to do, and found the country uninhabited as far as the coast, and far away to the south. The traditions of some tribes of South America point, though not so plainly, to the same conclusion. Thus, probably in the two halves of the New World, and certainly in the northern portion, those uninhabited lands existed which we have already noticed in Polynesia, and the pretended _American autochthon_ of Agassiz, Morton, Nott, and Gliddon was, on the contrary, one of the latest arrivals upon this continent. These facts of thin populations, and of their low social condition, which was everywhere the case except in those centres where legislators had appeared who were perhaps entirely foreign to the soil, involuntarily lead us to the conclusion that the general peopling of America by the existing races, though it may be traced to an earlier period than that of Polynesia, is, nevertheless, much more recent than that of the Old World. VI. It is not from Asia alone that America has received its population. They came from Europe also long before the era of great discoveries; I am not now alluding either to the story of Atlantis, of which many interpretations are still possible, or to Phœnician and Carthaginian traditions, nor again, to the pretentions of the Basques and Dieppois, although they appear to be supported by facts, which are, to say the least, curious; nor to Irish and Welsh traditions, though Humboldt considers them well worthy of attention. I shall only speak of the voyages accomplished by the Scandinavians as related by Rafn from Irish sagas, and which have been lately republished in detail by M. Gravier. We are not now dealing with isolated facts belonging to the darkness of those ages which they only occasionally illuminate. It is a detailed history embracing several generations, and sometimes giving circumstantial details which explain, and are confirmed by certain modern discoveries.