Note I-151 — Chapter I · ON THE ORIGIN OF THE AMERICANS. (continued 2)

Gebelin affirms enthusiastically: '"que cette inscription vient d'arriver tout exprès du nouveau monde, pour confirmer ses idées sur l'origine des peuples, et que l'on y voit, d'une manière évidente, un monument phénicien, un tableau qui, sur le devant, désigne une alliance entre les peuples américains et la nation étrangère, arrivant, par des vents du nord, d'un pays riche et industrieux."' Humboldt, however, commenting upon this, writes: 'J'ai examiné avec soin les quatre dessins de la fameuse pierre de Taunton River.... Loin d'y reconnoître un arrangement symétrique de lettres simples ou de caractères syllabiques, je n'y vois qu'un dessin à peine ébauché, et analogue à ceux que l'on a trouvés sur les rochers de la Norwège.' Vues, tom. i., pp. 181-2. 'The history of this inscription is scarcely surpassed, in the interest it has excited, or the novel phases it has exhibited at successive epochs of theoretical speculation, by any Perusinian, Eugubine, or Nilotic riddle. When the taste of American antiquaries inclined towards Phœnician relics, the Dighton inscription conformed to their opinions; and with changing tastes it has proved equally compliant. In 1783 the Rev. Ezra Stiles, D.D., President of Yale College, when preaching before the Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language: in proof that the Indians were of the accursed seed of Canaan, and were to be displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet!... So early as 1680 Dr. Danforth executed what he characterized as "a faithful and accurate representation of the inscription" on Dighton Rock. In 1712 the celebrated Dr. Cotton Mather procured drawings of the same, and transmitted them to the Secretary of the Royal Society of London, with a description, printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1741, referring to it as "an inscription in which are seven or eight lines, about seven or eight feet long, and about a foot wide, each of them engraven with unaccountable characters, not like any known character." In 1730, Dr. Isaac Greenwood, Hollisian Professor at Cambridge, New England, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries of London a drawing of the same inscription, accompanied with a description which proves the great care with which his copy was executed. In 1768, Mr. Stephen Sewall, Professor of Oriental Languages at Cambridge, New England, took a careful copy, the size of the original, and deposited it in the Museum of Harvard University; and a transcript of this was forwarded to the Royal Society of London, six years later, by Mr. James Winthrop, Hollisian Professor of Mathematics. In 1786 the Rev. Michael Lort, D.D., one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society of Antiquaries of London, again brought the subject, with all its accumulated illustrations, before that learned society; and Colonel Vallency undertook to prove that the inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Subsequently, Judge Winthrops executed a drawing in 1788; and again we have others by Judge Baylies and Mr. Joseph Gooding in 1790, by Mr. Job Gardner in 1812; and finally, in 1830, by a Commission appointed by the Rhode Island Historical Society, and communicated to the Antiquaries of Copenhagen with elaborate descriptions: which duly appear in their Antiquitates Americanæ, in proof of novel and very remarkable deductions.' Wilson's Prehist. Man, pp. 403-5. See also Pidgeon's Trad., p. 20.