LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE
AGAINST the HYPOTHESIS
Jan de Lact, 1625, exposed ' arbitrary use of single etymologies and isolated parallels in customs.
Jan de Lact cited Jose' de Acosta as an authority. Acosta had written that, "Those peoples [in America] had reached their habitat by ways traceable, not through texts, but only through rational conjectures by land migration from Asia."(Grafton, 1992)
Comments: Grotius may have been guilty of making grand hypoheses on the basis of a small group of words having similar sounds and meaning. A more likely scenario is that years of careful analysis was swiftly quashed by Jan de Lact using a few unexplained words as a pretext to debunk the whole comparison. (See against Sherwin.)
Already, by 1625, the European intellectual world was rejecting, without serious consideration, hypotheses that did not have the original people coming to America through Asia,
