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lowed to grow again. Another belief was, that when the dollars were put into this mysterious bank, they propagated and increased their kind, and that the 7000 full-grown dollars were taken out of the 100,000, and their places left to be supplied by the little dollars growing up to be big ones, like the rest. The more general belief was, however, that the bank was a place where a peculiar soil existed, in which the dollars were sown, like grain, and every year produced a crop, which was to furnish the 7000 dollars of annual interest. So general was this belief, that the gentleman who made the purchase was often afterward asked whether the seasons were favourable, and the crop promising at Philadelphia, so that they might be certain of receiving their full share.

In the annual division of this sum, he said that each father received a share proportioned to the number of his children; and that each person coming to the place of division brought his blanket, which he spread on the ground, laying on it a number of short sticks, indicating the number of his family, and the youngest and the oldest of these had an equal portion. They have no individual property except in their tents, horses, weapons, and apparel; all else is held in community, and the chief and the humbler Indians all share alike.

An opinion has often been expressed that the Indians of America are descendants of some of the lost tribes of Israel; but this opinion had never, perhaps, been put forth, with all the data on which it was founded, until of late. So recently as the year 1837, Major Noah, the editor of the New-York Evening Star, and himself a Jew of some learning, delivered a public lecture before the Mercantile Library Association of New-York, at Clinton Hall, intended to establish this fact; and the following are among the most prominent points established in that discourse.

The latest notice that is given of the dispersed tribes of Israel in the Sacred Writings is in the Book of Esdras, where the following verses occur:

"Whereas thou sawest another peaceable multitude: these are the ten tribes which were carried away prisoners out of their own land in the time of Osea, whom Salmanazar, king of Assyria, led away captive, and he carried them over the waters, so that they came unto another land."

"They took this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go into a farther country, wherein mankind never dwelt, that they might

there keep their statutes, which they never kept in their own land (Assyria): and there was a great way to go, namely, a year and a half."

It is supposed that these tribes marched from the banks of the Euphrates to the northeast of Asia, some remaining by the way in Tartary and China; in proof of which, Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the eleventh century through Persia, mentions, that in some of the provinces of that country, at the time of the decree of Ahasuerus, there were at least 300,000 Jews. Alvarez, in his history of China, states that there had been Jews living in that kingdom for many hundreds of years. Some went to India, as a Hebrew letter of the Jews of Cochin-China, written to their brethren at Amsterdam, gives, as the date of their coming into that country, the period when the Romans first conquered the Holy Land, and made Jydea a province of the Roman empire, which was some time before the birth of Christ.

From the various parts of Asia it is believed that the more enterprising and persevering went on gradually advancing by degrees to its northeastern extremity, till they arrived at Behring's Straits, where, during the winter, it would be perfectly easy to cross over to the nearest part of the Continent of America, a distance of less than thirty miles, and this rendered more easy by the existence of the Copper Islands in the way. Here it is believed that, during a course of two thousand years, they spread themselves from this point northward to Labrador, and southward to Cape Horn, multiplying as they proceeded; some settling in every part, but more populously in the rich countries and agreeable climate of Central America, including California, Texas, Mexico, and Peru.

On the first discovery of this continent by Columbus, those races now called Indians were found in very different stages of civilization. They were not all either rude, or savage, or ferocious; but, on the contrary, the greater number of them were remarkable for qualities that bespoke a noble origin. They had simple but sublime ideas of a Supreme Being, unmixed with the least tincture of idolatry; they had courage, constancy, humanity, hospitality, eloquence, love of their families, and fidelity to friends. It is, however, in the religious belief and ceremonies of the Indians, more than in anything else, that their resemblance to the people from whom they are believed to have descended is to be traced; and the chief points of these are thus enu

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merated: 1st, Their belief in one God. 2d, Their computation of time by the ceremonies of the new moon. 3d, Their division of the year into seasons corresponding with the Jewish festivals, of the feast of flowers, the day of atonement, the feast of the tabernacle, and other religious holydays. 4th, The erection of a temple after the manner of the Jews, with an ark of the covenant and altars. 5th, The division of their nation into tribes, with a chief or grand sachem at their head. 6th, Their laws of sacrifices, ablutions, marriages, ceremonies in war and peace, the prohibition of certain food, according to the Mosaic rule, their traditions, history, character, appearance, affinity of their language to the Hebrew, and, finally, by that everlasting covenant of heirship exhibited in a perpetual transmission of its seal in their flesh.

Such are the points enumerated by Major Noah in his discourse; and in the subsequent parts of it he adduces proofs, strengthened by the opinions of very eminent persons, whose authorities he cites. Among these are named Adair, Heckewelder, Charlevoix, M'Kenzie, Bartram, Beltrami, Smith, Penn, and Mr. Simon, the last of whom had written a highly-interesting work on this subject. Major Noah says that all these writers were struck with resem blances among the customs of the Indians to those with which they were acquainted as peculiar to the Jews; but the fact of Major Noah being a Jew himself, gives him great advantage over even all these, from his personal acquaintance with Jewish opinions, ceremonies, and usages, in all the minutiae of their details.

They call the Supreme Being Lo-ak (Light) Ish-ta-hoolaaba; which, says the writer, is distinctly Hebrew, and means "The great, supreme, beneficent Holy Spirit of Fire, who resides above." They have another name for the Deity, which, like the Jews, they never use in common speech, but only when performing their most sacred religious rites, and then they most solemnly divide it into syllables, with intermediate words, so as not to pronounce the ineffable name at once. In the sacred dances at the feast of the firstfruits, they sing Alelujah and Mesheha, from the Hebrew of Mesheach, the Messiah, "the anointed one," exclaiming "Yo, mesheha," "He, mesheha," "He, mesheha," "Wah, mesheha," thus making the Alelujah, the Meshiah, the Jehovah. On some occasions they sing "Shilu-yo, Shilu-he, Shilu-wah," the three terminations making up, in their order, the fourlettered Divine name in Hebrew, and Shilu being evidentVOL. I.-M

ly "Shiloth the messenger, the peace-maker." The number of Hebrew words used in their religious services is, says Major Noah, incredible, and he gives abundant instances; among which, the name of lightning is Eloah, and the rumbling of thunder is called Rowah, from the Hebrew word Ruach, or spirit.

The Indians divide the year into four seasons, with festivals peculiar to each; they calculate by moons, and celebrate, as the Jews do, the berachah helebana, "the blessing for the new moon." The chief priest wears a breastplate of a white conch-shell, ornamented so as to resemble the precious stones in the Urim, and he binds his brow with a wreath of swan's feathers, and wears a tuft of white feathers which he calls Yatina. The Indians have their ark, which they invariably carry with them to battle, and never suffer it to rest on the ground or to be unguarded; and they have as great faith in the power of their ark as the Israelites ever had in theirs. "No person," says Adair, "is ever permitted to open all the coverings of this ark; and tradition informs them that curiosity having induced three different persons to examine the mysterious shell, they were immediately punished for their profanation by blindness, the very punishment threatened to the Jews for daring to look upon the Holy of Holies."

Their observance of a great day of atonement, about the same period of the year at which it is observed by the Jews, attended with many of the same ceremonies, and for the same object, is extremely remarkable; and as it respects sacrifices, the resemblance is even still more striking. The bathings, ablutions, and anointings are Jewish in their character, as is also the abstaining from eating the blood of any animal, from the use of swine's flesh, of fish without scales, and other animals and birds deemed by the Mosaic law to be impure. Women caught in adultery are stoned to death, as among the Jews of old; and, as in the Mosaic law, the brother is obliged to marry the widow of his brother if he die without issue.

Of the authors who have written in support of these views there is a very long catalogue, and some of very early date. Manasseh Ben Israel, a learned Jew, who flourished about 1650, wrote a treatise to prove that the Indians were descended from the Israelites; this was soon after the discovery of America by Columbus. William Penn, the Quaker, founder of Pennsylvania, though he does not appear to have suspected this descent, says, in one of his letters to his friends

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in England, of the Indians, "I found them with like countenances to the Hebrew races. I consider these people as under a dark night, yet they believe in God and immortality, without the aid of metaphysics. They reckon by moons, they offer their first-ripe fruits, they have a kind of feast of tabernacles, they are said to lay their altars with twelve stones; they mourn a year, and observe the Jewish law with respect to separation." The Rev. Mr. Beatty, a missionary among the Indians, Emanuel de Mezeray, a Portuguese historian of the Brazils, Monsieur de Guignes, the French historian of China, Beltrami, the Italian traveller, who discovered the sources of the Mississippi, all concur in this view; and the Earl of Crawford and Lindsey, who published his Travels in America in 1801, says, "It is curious and pleasing to find how the customs of these people comport with the laws of Moses." He afterward adds, "It is a sound truth that the Indians are descended from the ten tribes; and time and investigation will more and more enforce its acknowledgment."

Among the Indians of Mexico and Peru, who were the most enlightened and civilized, though all springing from the same stock, the resemblances were more manifest. Montesini, who travelled in South America, states that "his Indian guide admitted to him that his God was called Adonai; and he acknowledged Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as his ancestors, and claimed to be descended from the tribe of Reuben. He was, in short, a perfect Jew; immense numbers like himself were said by him to live behind the Cordilleras." Acoasta mentions that they have a tradition relative to the great deluge; that they preserve the rite of circumcision; and in Peru they eat the paschal lamb. He adds that the Mexicans point out the various stations by which their ancestors advanced into the country, and it is precisely the route by which they must have come to America, supposing them to have emigrated from Asia. Manasseh Ben Israel declares that the Indians of Mexico had a tradition that their magnificent places of worship had been built by a people who wore their beards, and were more ancient than their incas. Escobartus affirms that he frequently heard the southern tribes repeat the sacred notes Hal-le-luyah; and Malvenda states that several tombstones were found on St. Michael's with ancient Hebrew characters. When the Spaniards invaded Mexico, the Cholula was considered a holy city by the natives, in which the high-priest, Quetzacolt, preached "peace to man," and would permit