Note 207 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
"Notwithstanding the striking analogies existing between the nations of the New Continent and the Tartar tribes who have adopted the religion of Bouddah, I think I discover in the mythology of the Americans, in the style of their paintings, in their languages, and especially in their external conformation, the descendants of a race of men, which, early separated from the rest of mankind, has followed for a lengthened series of years a peculiar road in the unfolding of its intellectual faculties, and in its tendency toward civilization."—Humboldt's Ancient Inhabitants of America, vol. i., p. 200.
"It can not be doubted that the greater part of the nations of America belong to a race of men who, isolated ever since the infancy of the world from the rest of mankind, exhibit in the nature and diversity of language, in their features, and the conformation of their skull, incontestable proofs of an early and complete civilization."—Ibid., vol. i., p. 250.
On the American races in general, Humboldt refers to the beautiful work of Samuel George Morton, Craniæ Americanæ, 1839, p. 62-86; and an account of the skulls brought by Pentland from the Highlands of Titicaca, in the 'Dublin Journal of Medical and Chemical Science,' vol. v., p. 475, 1834; also, Alcide d'Orbigny, L'Homme Américain considéré sous ses Rapports Physiol. et Mor., p. 221, 1839; and, further, the work, so full of delicate ethnographical observations, of Prinz Maximilian of Wied, Reise in das Innere von Nordamerika, 1839.