The ancient nations of Austral America are the least known on many accounts, and those on whom most fables and systems have been based. It is there that dwell the _Patagons_, who have been believed a peculiar species of giants; and those tribes of Chaco, &c., which Azara has deemed peculiar men, with languages without affinities with any other: which will easily be proved to be quite false.
If America has had an aboriginal population, or _Autoctons_, men born from the soil: it is there they should be found, driven to the south and those remote climes by the ancient colonies of other nations; and they should offer features, complexions, languages and manners totally different from any other. If all the Americans derive from ancient colonies, it is still there that ought to be found the primitive tribes, driven on by the subsequent colonies and tribes. Therefore these Austral tribes are exceedingly interesting to study as the most ancient relics of American population.
But the origin of the American nations and tribes are only to be considered as a branch of their history. The accounts of their dispersion and successive settlements, the history of the events which they have remembered and transmitted to us by traditions or annals, those of the empires which have been founded there in ancient and modern times, the study of their civilization and ethnography ... offer surely much more interest, and a wide field of historical facts or enquiries.
It appears that as soon as we speak of the ancient Americans, we ought to cut the gordian knot, and say whence they came. I do not wish to explain beforehand, all my views on this subject. I wish to reserve them for the results of the enquiries to be pursued in this work. Yet to satisfy the general curiosity expressed on the subject, I may venture to say that I have not yet found in either Americas, any people or tribe totally different from any other, or without philological affinities: nor with features, complexions, and other physical characters quite peculiar. But instead, all the ancient American tribes have numerous affinities between each other, and with races of mankind in the Eastern hemisphere: both physical and moral, as well as philological.