wise
disgraced and dishonoured.

They set out for the country of the Iroquois in the month of May, 1698.
After travelling for many weeks, at a great rate, for the Savages are
inconceivably swift walkers, and can endure great fatigues, they
arrived at the principal town of the Five Nations. There, and elsewhere
within the limits of that confederacy, our traveller abode two full
years. The public must not expect to find in this brief introduction a
cursory statement, much less a minute journal of his curious
observations and discoveries during that period. The Editor would make a
very bad use of the confidence reposed in him, if he were to attempt
either. Public curiosity, however, will be gratified, for the highly
learned and philosophical reports of M. Verdier on the philology,
origin, history, manners, and customs, of the Aborigines of America,
will soon be published under the eye of a competent gentleman. But, for
the immediate satisfaction of those who have had their minds highly
excited on the subject, and prefer to have their knowledge in advance,
the Editor begs leave to observe, that these reports fully prove that
the Indians of North America and the Tartars of the Eastern continent
are of a common stock. The former, M. Verdier proves, by a long train of
reasoning, to be descended from a Calmuck, who, in the year 622, (the
year of Mahomet's flight from Mecca) married a Samoyede woman, and, with
a party of his countrymen, crossed Behring's Straits to the Western
Continent. The exceedingly subtle and plausible process by which he
arrived at the exact year in which they crossed, and determined that the
emigrants were of two different tribes--again, that the chief was tall
and lean, his wife short, pursy, and thick-breathed, proved the value of
trifling circumstances to the creation of beautiful theories, and with
what wonderful ingenuity philosophic minds apply themselves to subjects
capable of being theorised. Thus, from the circumstance that the Indian
curs, when they were possessed of a bone, would snarl and show their
teeth if one went near them, and even hide it in the ground rather than
have it taken from them, he drew the conclusion that they were the true
_canis sibericus_, which is known to possess these singular traits of
canine sagacity and ferociousness. Additional proof was found in the
fact, that an Indian dog of the same species bit M. Verdier in his heel,
setting his teeth in precisely the same spot,