, and folios, has let us out at the
end of his work just as wise as we were at the beginning. It was doubtless
some philosophical wild-goose chase of the kind that made the old poet
Macrobius rail in such a passion at curiosity, which he anathematises most
heartily as "an irksome, agonising care, a superstitious industry about
unprofitable things, an itching humor to see what is not to be seen, and
to be doing what signifies nothing when it is done." But to proceed.

Of the claims of the children of Noah to the original population of this
country I shall say nothing, as they have already been touched upon in my
last chapter. The claimants next in celebrity are the descendants of
Abraham. Thus Christoval Colon (vulgarly called Columbus), when he first
discovered the gold mines of Hispaniola, immediately concluded, with a
shrewdness that would have done honor to a philosopher, that he had found
the ancient Ophir, from whence Solomon procured the gold for embellishing
the temple at Jerusalem; nay, Colon even imagined that he saw the remains
of furnaces of veritable Hebraic construction, employed in refining the
precious ore.

So golden a conjecture, tinctured with such fascinating extravagance, was
too tempting not to be immediately snapped at by the gudgeons of
learning; and, accordingly, there were divers profound writers ready to
swear to its correctness, and to bring in their usual load of authorities
and wise surmises, wherewithal to prop it up. Vatablus and Robert Stephens
declared nothing could be more clear; Arius Montanus, without the least
hesitation, asserts that Mexico was the true Ophir, and the Jews the early
settlers of the country. While Possevin, Becan, and several other
sagacious writers lug in a supposed prophecy of the fourth book of Esdras,
which being inserted in the mighty hypothesis, like the keystone of an
arch, gives it, in their opinion, perpetual durability.

Scarce, however, have they completed their goodly superstructure when in
trudges a phalanx of opposite authors with Hans de Laet, the great
Dutchman, at their head, and at one blow tumbles the whole fabric about
their ears. Hans, in fact, contradicts outright all the Israelitish claims
to the first settlement of this country, attributing all those equivocal
symptoms, and traces of Christianity and Judaism, which have been said to
be found in divers provinces of the new world, to the Devil, who has
always effected to counterfeit the worship