The silly attempts that have been made to establish an oriental origin for the North American Indians, have never produced any other conviction in an unbiased mind, than that the facts brought forward to support that theory existed only in the imaginations of those who advanced them.  The colour, the form, the manners, habits, and propensities of the Indians, all combine to establish that they are a distinct race of human beings, and could never have emanated from any people of European, Asiatic, or African origin.  The notion that climate would be sufficient to produce an essential change in the appearance of any number of individuals, cannot now be maintained; since from the discovery of America, Europeans, Africans, and Indians have inhabited all regions of this vast continent, without undergoing the slightest characteristic change from the descendants of the original stock, who have remained in their primitive locations.  The Power that induces the existence of plants and lower animals indigenous to the different sections of the earth, seems also to induce the existence of a race of men peculiar to the regions in which they are found.

The languages of America are radically different from those of the old world; and no similitude can be traced between the tongues of the red men, and those of any other people hitherto known.  Jarvis, in his Paper on the Religion of the Indian Tribes of North America, says, “The best informed writers agree, that there are, exclusive of the Karalit or Esquimaux, three radical languages spoken by the Indians of North America.  Mr. Heckwelder denominates them the Iroquois, the Lenape, and the Floridian.  The Iroquois is spoken by the Six Nations, the Wyandots, or Hurons, the Nandowessies, the Assiniboils, and other tribes beyond the St. Lawrence.  The Lenape, which is the most widely extended language on this side the Mississippi, was spoken by the tribes now extinct, who formerly inhabited Nova Scotia and the present state of Maine, the Abenakis, Micmacs, Canibas, Openangos, Soccokis, Etchemins, and Souriquois; dialects of it are now spoken by the Miamis, the Potawatomies, Missisangoes, and Kickapoos; the Eonestogas, Nanticokes, Shawanese, and Mohicans; the Algonquins, Knisteneaux, and Chippeways.  The Floridian includes the languages of the Creeks, or Muskohgees, Chickesaws, Choctaws, Pascagoulas, Cherokees, Seminolese, and several other tribes in the southern states and Florida.  These three languages are primitive; that is to say, are so distinct as to have no perceivable affinity.  All, therefore, cannot be derived from the Hebrew; for it is a contradiction in terms to speak of three languages radically different, as derived from a common source.  Which, then, we may well ask, is to be selected as the posterity of the Israelites:  the Iroquois, the Lenape, or the southern Indians?

“Besides, there is one striking peculiarity in the construction of American languages, which has no counterpart in the Hebrew.  Instead of the ordinary division of genders, they divide into animate and inanimate.  It is impossible to conceive that any nation, in whatever circumstances they might be placed, could depart in so remarkable a manner from the idioms of their native language.”