e are many words in the American language, which have a
relation to the German and Norwegian; and that the Americans still
preserve the customs of the country from whence they are originally
sprung. As to the people of Jucatan, and the neighbourhood, Grotius
makes them come from Ethiopia by the way of the Ocean. He grounds this
opinion on the practice of circumcision among these nations of America,
which was also used by the Ethiopians. He pretends that the Peruvians
are descended from the Chinese, because the wrecks of Chinese vessels
have been found, he says, on the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, and they
worship the sun: besides, the Peruvians, he adds, write from the top to
the bottom of the page like the Chinese.

Laet easily shewed that Grotius's conjectures were ill founded, and that
he had even advanced several facts which were not strictly true: he
denied the existence of the city of Norembega, and maintained that
Jucatan is too distant from Africa for the Ethiopians to penetrate into
America, it being at least two months sail from Ethiopia to Jucatan. He
refutes the pretended traces of Christianity, which Grotius said were
found in that part of America before the discovery of the Spaniards,
supporting his confutation on the authority of Spanish writers; in fine,
he denies that any Chinese wrecks have been found on the coasts of the
Pacific Ocean, and censures, as a very great inaccuracy in Grotius, what
he advances concerning the Peruvian manner of writing.

After doing justice to the excellent judgment and profound erudition of
Grotius, he ventures to assert, that he found nothing in his
Dissertation that could satisfy a man moderately acquainted with the
History of America; and approves of what was observed by Joseph Acosta,
that it was easier to confute what was written on the origin of the
Americans, than to know what to hold; because there were no monuments
among them, nor any books of Europeans to throw light on this matter:
and hence concludes, that it is rashness to promise truth on such an
obscure subject.

Laet's answer vexed Grotius: he replied to it in a second Dissertation,
entitled, _Adversus obtrectatorem, opaca quem bonum facit barba_.
Printed at Paris by Cramoisi, in 1643. Laet answered in a piece, printed
in 1644, by Lewis Elzevir, in which he inserts Grotius's second
Dissertation. There is nothing new in these two last books: and it were
to be wished that they had been written with less bitt