[Footnote 62:  See Crantz’s History of Greenland, vol. i. p. 262; where we are told that the Moravian brethren, who, with the consent and furtherance of Sir Hugh Palliser, then governor of Newfoundland, visited the Esquimaux on the Labradore coast, found that their language, and that of the Greenlanders, do not differ so much as that of the High and Low Dutch.—­D.]

[Footnote 63:  The Greenlanders, as Crantz tells us, call themselves Karalit; a word not very unlike Kanagyst, the name assumed by the inhabitants of Kodiack, one of the Schumagin islands, as Staehlin informs us.—­D.]

There are other doubts of a more important kind, which, it may be hoped, will now no longer perplex the ignorant, or furnish matter of cavil to the ill-intentioned.  After the great discovery, or at least the full confirmation of the great discovery, of the vicinity of the two continents of Asia and America, we trust that we shall not, for the future, be ridiculed, for believing that the former could easily furnish its inhabitants to the latter.  And thus, to all the various good purposes already enumerated, as answered by our late voyages, we may add this last, though not the least important, that they have done service to religion, by robbing infidelity of a favourite objection to the credibility of the Mosaic account of the peopling of the earth.[64]

[Footnote 64:  A contempt of revelation is generally the result of ignorance, conceited of its possessing superior knowledge.  Observe how the author of Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains, expresses himself on this very point.  “Cette distance que Mr Antermony veut trouver si peu impotante, est a-peu-pres de huit cent lieus Gauleises au travers d’un ocean perilleux, et impossible a franchir avec des canots aussi chetifs et aussi fragiles que le sont, au rapport d’Ysbrand Ides, les chaloupes des Tunguses,” &c. &c. t. i. p. 156.  Had this writer known that the two continents are not above thirteen leagues (instead of eight hundred) distant from each other, and that, even in that narrow space of sea, there are intervening islands, he would not have ventured to urge this argument in opposition to Mr Bell’s notion of the quarter from which North America received its original inhabitants.—­D.

No intelligent reader needs to be informed, that a much closer approach of the two continents of Asia and America than is here alleged to exist, would be inadequate to account for the peopling of the latter, throughout its immense extent and very important diversities of appearance.  The opinion is more plausible, and gains ground in the world, that much of South America derived its original inhabitants from the opposite coast of Africa.  It is enough to state this opinion, without occupying a moment’s attention, in discussing the arguments which can be adduced in its support.  The truth of Revelation, it may be remarked, is quite unaffected by the controversy, and,