but we have sufficient references in classic authors to lands on the other side of the ocean, to feel assured of some indistinct rumours of such lands having reached them, and those rumours were most probably obtained from Phœnician or Carthaginian sources. It would be foreign to the purposes of this essay to enter fully upon this proof; but it will be sufficient for me here, in connection with the subject, to observe, that the hypothesis seems to me most correct, of the civilization which formerly existed in Yucatan and Central America having owed its origin to the Phœnicians, who, as being immediate neighbours to the Jews and to the Egyptians, no doubt held many of their customs in common with them, so as to account for what few Jewish or Egyptian analogies have been found in that part of the New World. Many very respectable Greek and Latin authors, it is true, whose inquiries led them directly to the subject — Pliny and Strabo, for instance — have no reference to any such knowledge, perhaps because, having no sea-faring persons to consult on it respecting such extraordinary particulars, they forbore to enter on any discussion of what they could neither assert nor deny. But there are at least ten or a dozen no less respectable authors of antiquity who have given such notices of other lands, some fully, others slightly and incidentally, but not the less trustworthily, as to make it a matter of surprise that scholars should have passed over them so almost unnoticed. Modern investigations, also, seem to me to prove the fact incontestably. The ruined cities of Yucatan and Central America, existing almost entirely on the sea-coast, and decreasing sensibly as we proceed inland, shew that they owed their origin to some foreign maritime people, rather than to any indigenous civilization. If that foreign people had been Phœnicians or Carthaginians, they would no doubt have brought numbers of other African nations in their train, besides those who had found in their way across, independently of them, over the comparatively smooth waters of those regions, where the smallest and worst-founded boats have only to run before the wind, and, with the current, must ere long have reached the opposite shores. These, and any other wandering tribes found in the interior, a civilized people would soon have gathered under their dominion. Many of those who came over at the same periods might have also formed independent communities, as the Guanches, whose peculiar mode of desiccating their dead may be believed traceable in the remains of some of the ancient inhabitants of America reported by different writers. The religious rites of
