, may I ever forfeit the reputation of a
regular bred historian! No--no--most curious and thrice-learned readers
(for thrice learned ye are if ye have read all that has gone before, and
nine times learned shall ye be if ye read that which comes after), we have
yet a world of work before us. Think you the first discoverers of this
fair quarter of the globe had nothing to do but go on shore and find a
country ready laid out and cultivated like a garden, wherein they might
revel at their ease? No such thing. They had forests to cut down,
underwood to grub up, marshes to drain, and savages to exterminate. In
like manner, I have sundry doubts to clear away, questions to resolve, and
paradoxes to explain before I permit you to range at random; but these
difficulties once overcome we shall be enabled to jog on right merrily
through the rest of our history. Thus my work shall, in a manner, echo the
nature of the subject, in the same manner as the sound of poetry has been
found by certain shrewd critics to echo the sense--this being an
improvement in history which I claim the merit of having invented.

CHAPTER IV.

The next inquiry at which we arrive in the regular course of our history
is to ascertain, if possible, how this country was originally peopled--a
point fruitful of incredible embarrassments; for unless we prove that the
aborigines did absolutely come from somewhere, it will be immediately
asserted in this age of scepticism, that they did not come at all; and if
they did not come at all, then was this country never populated--a
conclusion perfectly agreeable to the rules of logic, but wholly
irreconcilable to every feeling of humanity, inasmuch as it must
syllogistically prove fatal to the innumerable aborigines of this populous
region.

To avert so dire a sophism, and to rescue from logical annihilation so
many millions of fellow-creatures, how many wings of geese have been
plundered! what oceans of ink have been benevolently drained! and how many
capacious heads of learned historians have been addled and for ever
confounded! I pause with reverential awe when I contemplate the ponderous
tomes in different languages, with which they have endeavored to solve
this question, so important to the happiness of society, but so involved
in clouds of impenetrable obscurity. Historian after historian has engaged
in the endless circle of hypothetical argument, and, after leading us a
weary chase through octavos, quartos