Note 178 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Storia Ant. del Messico, tom. iv, p. 15. We quote the following from the translation by Cullan, London, 1807: “We do not doubt that the population of America has been very ancient, and more so than it may seem to have been to European authors: 1. Because the Americans wanted those arts and inventions, such, for example, as those of wax and oil for light, which on the one hand being very ancient in Europe and Asia, are on the other most useful, not to say necessary, and when once discovered are never forgotten. 2. Because the polished nations of the new world, and particularly those of Mexico, preserve in their traditions and in their paintings the memory of the creation of the world and of the building of the Tower of Babel, the confusion of languages and the dispersion of the people, though blended with some fables, and had no knowledge of the events which happened afterwards in Asia, in Africa, or in Europe, although many of them were so great and remarkable that they could not easily have gone from their memories. 3. Because neither was there among the Americans any knowledge of the people of the old continent, nor among the latter any account of the passage of the former to the new world.” He then cites Votan. See further on early views, Gottfried Wagner’s De Originibus Amer. Disertatio Lipsiæ, 1669; Hugo Grotius’s Dissertatio de Origine Gentium Americanorum Amstelodami, 1642; Jean De Laet’s Notæ ad Diss. H. Grotii de Originine Gent. Americ., 1643; Jean De Laet’s Responsio ad H. Grotii Diss. de Origine Gent. Americ., 1644; Poisson’s Animadrersiones in Originem Peruvianorum et Mexicanorum, Parisiis, 1644; Georgius Hornius’s De Originibus Americanis Hagæ, 1652; Rocha’s Tratado Unico y Singulare del Origin de los Indios Occidentales, del Peru, Mexico, Santa Fe, y Chile; Lima, 1681; Engel’s Essai sur Cette Question: Comment l’Amérique est-elle été Peuplée d’Hommes et d’Ammaux, Amsterdam, 1767; Corn. De Pauw’s Recherche sur l’Amérique et les Americans, Berlin, 1774; Vater’s Untersuchungen über America’s Bevölkerung aus dem alten Continent, Leipzig, 1810.