HORN, Georg.

De originibus Americanis libri quatuor.

Leiden, P. de Croy, for A. Vlacq at The Hague, 1652. Small 8vo (150 x 90 mm), pp. [xx], 282; title printed in red and black; light browning, last three leaves bound out of sequence; contemporary sheep, rebacked. First edition. This treatise on the origins of the American peoples was a product of the polemic between Joannes de Laet and Hugo Grotius provoked by publication of the latter’s De origine gentium Americanarum in 1642. De Laet’s ideas were generally endorsed by Horn.Grotius thought that all the Americans were late arrivals, proposed Norwegian origins for the Indians in the North, Ethiopian for Yucatán, and Chinese for the Peruvians, and rejected all other theories. De Laet was especially bitter that Grotius had ignored material supplied by him when he, an acknowledged expert on America, had been invited to comment on Grotius’s manuscript. He printed a rebuttal in 1643, arguing that the diversity and large number of American peoples could only be explained by their ancient origins, that these were Asiatic, and that Asia and America had at some remote time most probably been connected by land (Genesis-based traditions of diffusionism, that all tribes were descended from Adam by way of Noah, ruled out the possibility of an autochthonous ‘wild state’ of man in America for all parties in the controversy). See Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians pp. 118–127.Alden 652/111; Field 717; Meulen & Diermanse p. 330; Sabin 33014.

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