of the Kuro-Shiwo were drifted or stranded on the coast of North
America, or on the Hawaiian or adjacent islands. As merchant ships and
ships of war are known to have been built in Japan prior to the
Christian era, a great number of disabled junks containing small parties
of Japanese must have been stranded on the Aleutian islands and on the
Alaskan coast in past centuries, thereby furnishing evidence of a
constant infusion of Japanese blood among the coast tribes.

Leaving aside any attempt to show the ethnical relations of these facts,
the question naturally occurs whether any of these waifs ever found
their way back from the American coast. On observing the course of the
great circle of the Kuro-Shiwo and the course of the trade winds, one
inclines to the belief that such a thing is not beyond the range of
possibility. Indeed, several well-authenticated instances are mentioned
by Mr. Brooks; and in connection with the subject he advances a further
hypothesis, namely, the American origin of the Chinese race, and shows
in a plausible way that--

The ancestry of China may have embarked in large vessels as
emigrants, perhaps from the vicinity of the Chincha Islands, or
proceeded with a large fleet, like the early Chinese expedition
against Japan, or that of Julius Cæsar against Britain, or the
Welsh Prince Madog and his party, who sailed from Ireland and
landed in America A.D. 1170; and, in like manner, in the dateless
antecedure of history, crossed from the neighborhood of Peru to the
country now known to us as China.

If America be the oldest continent, paleontologically speaking, as
Agassiz tells us, there appears to be some reason for looking to it as
the spot where early traces of the race are to be found, and the fact