V.—Dissertation on a Peruvian Musical Instrument like the Syrinx of the Ancients

Extract

The attention which has of late years been paid to the elucidation of the manners and arts of the ancient inhabitants of America, has been productive of the most convincing proofs of the communication between the Eastern and Western Continents at remote but unknown epochs. The learned and highly-interesting researches of Humboldt on the antiquities of the New World, have irresistibly led him to this conclusion, which has farther been strengthened by the researches of later travellers. The comparison of the idioms of the Asiatic and American tongues, has hitherto not afforded very direct proof; because the philologist has not yet been put in possession of a sufficient number of materials to make the comparison with advantage. Our ignorance of the languages and customs of Central Asia is a great bar to such studies, and needs not any other illustration than the fact that a highly-polished nation, with a literature and arts hitherto almost unknown in Europe, should have existed for ages in Central Asia. Our countryman, Dr Gerard, stimulated by the humane desire of extending the blessings of vaccination to Thibet, has been for some time in that country, and has discovered in its language an Encyclopædia in forty-four volumes, of which the medical part alone fills five volumes; and he finds, that the art of Lithography, so new in Europe, has been practised from time immemorial in Kinnaour, a principal city in Thibet, where he found it employed to display the anatomy of the human body.