IV PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN

The department of American ethnology, notwithstanding its many indefatigable workers, is still to a large extent a virgin soil. The western hemisphere is rich in materials for ethnical study, but there is urgent demand for diligent labourers to rescue them for future use. On all hands we see ancient nations passing away. The prairie tribes are vanishing with the buffalo; the Flathead Indians of diverse types and stranger tongues; and, more interesting than either, the ingenious Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands: are all diminishing in numbers, giving up their distinctive customs, and confusing their mythic and legendary traditions with foreign admixtures; while some are destined to speedy extinction.

When, in 1846, the artist, Paul Kane, entered on his exploratory travels among the tribes of the North-West, the Flathead Indians of Oregon and British Columbia embraced populous settlements of Cowlitz, Chinook, Newatee, and other nations. Now the researches of the American Bureau of Ethnology are stimulated by the disclosure that of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes there are only three survivors who speak the former language, and only one with a knowledge of the latter. Of the Klaskanes, in like manner, only one is known to survive; and from a like solitary representative of the Tuteloes the language of a vanished race has recently been rescued. With all the native tribes who have been brought into near relations with the intruding white race their languages and customs are undergoing important modifications. Other elements of confusion and erasure are also at work. A large influx of Chinese complicates the ethnological problem; and it cannot be wisely left to the efforts of individuals, carried on without concert, and on no comprehensive or systematic plan, to rescue for future study the invaluable materials of American ethnology. To the native languages especially the inquirer into some of the curious problems involved in the peopling of this continent must look for a key to the mystery.

The intelligent inquirer cannot fail to be rewarded for any time he may devote to a consideration of the condition and relative status of the aborigines, north of the Gulf of Mexico, not only as studied from existing native tribes, or from those known since the discovery of America in 1492, but in so far as we can determine their earlier condition with the aid of archæological evidence. The student of the history of the North American nations cannot indeed altogether overlook the undoubted fact that Columbus was not the first of European voyagers within the Christian era to enter on the colonisation of the western hemisphere; whatever value he may attach to the legends and traditions of more ancient explorers.

The part played by the Scandinavian stock in European history proves their abundant aptitude to have been the organisers of a Northland of their own in the New World. The Northmen lingered behind, in their first home in the Scandinavian peninsula, while Goth, Longobard, Vandal, Suevi, Frank, Burgundian, and other tribes from the Baltic first wasted and then revolutionised the Roman world. But they were nursing a vigorous youth, which ere long, as pagan Dane, and then as Norman, stamped a new character on mediæval Europe. Their presence in the New World rests on indubitable evidence; but the very definiteness of its character in their inhospitable northern retreat helps to destroy all faith in any mere conjectural fancies relative to their settlement on points along the Atlantic seaboard which they are supposed to have visited.

Runic inscriptions on the Canadian and New England seaboard would, if genuine, give an entirely novel aspect to our study of Pre-Columbian American history, with all its possibilities of older intercourse with the eastern hemisphere. But it is the same whether we seek for traces of colonisation in the tenth or the fifteenth century, in so far as all native history is concerned. They equally little suffice to furnish evidence of relationship, in blood, language, arts or customs, between any people of the eastern hemisphere and the native American races. We are indeed invited from time to time to review indications suggestive of an Asiatic or other old-world source for the American aborigines; and in nearly every system of ethnical classification they are, with good reason, ranked as Mongolidæ; but if their pedigree is derived from an Asiatic stock, the evidence has yet to be marshalled which shall place on any well-established basis the proofs of direct ethnical affinity between them and races of the eastern hemisphere. The ethnological problem is, here as elsewhere, beset by many obscuring elements. Language, at best, yields only remote analogies, and thus far American archæology, though studied with unflagging zeal, has been able to render very partial aid.

It cannot admit of question that the compass of American archæology,—including that of the semi-civilised and lettered races of Central and Southern America,—is greatly circumscribed in comparison with that of Europe. But the simplicity which results from this has some compensating elements in its direct adaptation to the study of man, as he appears on the continent unaffected by the artificialities of a forced civilisation, and with so little that can lend countenance to any theory of degeneracy from a higher condition of life. In the modern alliance between archæology and geology, and the novel views which have resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures of primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have given a significance to familiar phases of savage life undreamt of till very recently. The student who has by such means formed a definite conception of primeval art, and realised some idea of the condition and acquirements of the savage of Europe’s Post-Pliocene era, turns with renewed interest to living races seemingly perpetuating in arts and habits of our own day what gave character to the social life of the prehistoric dawn. This phase of primitive art can still be studied on more than one continent, and in many an island of the Pacific and the Indian ocean; but nowhere is the apparent reproduction of such initial phases of the history of our race presented in so comprehensive an aspect as on the American continent. There man is to be found in no degree superior in arts or habits to the Australian savage; while evidence of ingenious skill and of considerable artistic taste occur among nomads exposed to the extremest privations of an Arctic climate; and with no more knowledge of metallurgy than is implied in occasionally turning to account the malleable native copper, by hammering it into the desired shape; or, in their intercourse with Arctic voyagers and Hudson’s Bay trappers, acquiring by barter some few implements and weapons of European manufacture. The arts of the patient Eskimo, exercised under the stimulus of their constant struggle for existence amid all the hardships of a polar climate, have, indeed, not only suggested comparisons between them and the artistic cave-dwellers of Central Europe in its prehistoric dawn; but have been assumed to prove an ethnical affinity, and direct descent, altogether startling when we fully realise the remote antiquity thereby assigned to those Arctic nomads, and the unchanging condition ascribed to them through all the intervening ages of geographical and social revolution.

But whatever may be the value ultimately assigned to the Eskimo pedigree, a like phenomenon of unprogressive humanity, perpetuating through countless generations the same rudimentary arts, everywhere presents itself, and seems to me to constitute the really remarkable feature in North American ethnology and archæology. We find, not only in Canada but throughout the whole region northward from the Gulf of Mexico, diversified illustrations of savage life; but nearly all of them unaffected by traces of contact with earlier civilisation. From the northern frontiers of Canada the explorer may travel through widely diversified regions till he reach the cañons of Mexico and the ruined cities of Central America; and all that he finds of race and art, of language or native tradition, is in contrast to the diversities of the European record of manifold successions of races and of arts. There within the Arctic circle the Eskimo constructs his lodge of snow, and successfully maintains the battle for life under conditions which determine to a large extent the character of his ingenious arts and manufacture. Immediately to the south are found the nomad tribes of forest and prairie, with their téepees of buffalo-skin, or their birch-bark wigwams and canoes: wandering hunter tribes of the great North-West; type of the red Indian of the whole northern continent. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys abound with earthworks and other remains of the vanished race of the Mound-Builders: of old the dwellers there in fortified towns, agriculturalists, ingenious potters, devoted to the use of tobacco, expending laborious art on their sculptured pipes, and with some exceptionally curious skill in practical geometry; yet, they too, ignorant of almost the very rudiments of metallurgy, and only in the first stage of the organised life of a settled community. The modifying influences of circumstances must be recognised in the migratory or settled habits of different tribes. The Eskimo are of necessity hunters and fishers, yet they are not, strictly speaking, nomads. In summer they live in tents, constantly moving from place to place, as the exigencies of the reindeer-hunting, seal-hunting, or fishing impel them. But they generally winter in the same place for successive generations, and manifest as strong an attachment to their native home as the dwellers in more favoured lands. Their dwelling-houses accommodate from three or four to ten families; and the same tendency to gather in communities under one roof is worthy of notice wherever other wandering tribes settle even temporarily. A drawing, made by me in 1866, of a birch-bark dwelling which stood among a group of ordinary wigwams on the banks of the Kaministiquia, shows a lodge of sufficiently large dimensions to accommodate several families of a band of Chippewas, who had come from the far West to trade their furs with the Hudson’s Bay factor there. The Haidahs, the Chinooks, the Nootkas, the Columbian and other Indian tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, all use temporary tents or huts in their frequent summer wanderings; but their permanent dwellings are huge structures sufficient to accommodate many families, and sometimes the whole tribe. They are constructed of logs or split planks, and in some cases, as among the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte Islands, they are elaborately decorated with carving and painting.

The gregarious habits thus manifested by many wandering tribes, whenever circumstances admit of their settling down in a permanent home, may be due mainly to the economy of labour which experience has taught them in the construction of one common dwelling, instead of the multiplication of single huts or lodges. But far to the southward are the ancient pueblos, the casas grandes, the cliff dwellings, of a race not yet extinct: timid, unaggressive, living wholly on the defensive, gathered in large communities like ants or bees; industrious, frugal, and manifesting ingenious skill in their pottery and other useful arts; but, they too, in no greatly advanced stage. Still farther to the south we come at length to the seats of an undoubted native American civilisation. The comparative isolation of Central America, and the character of its climate and productions, all favoured a more settled life; with, as genuine results, its architecture, sculpture, metallurgy, hieroglyphics, writing, and all else that gives so novel a character to the memorials of the Central American nations. But great as is their contrast with the wild tribes of the continent, the highest phases of native civilisation will not compare with the arts of Egypt, in centuries before Cadmus taught letters to the rude shepherds of Attica, or the wolf still suckled her cubs on the Palatine hill.

If this is a correct reading of American archæology, its bearings are significant in reference to the whole history of American man. In Europe the student of primitive antiquity is habitually required to discriminate between products of ingenious skill belonging to periods and races widely separated alike by time and by essentially diverse stages of progress in art. For not only do its Palæolithic and Neolithic periods long precede the oldest written chronicles; but even its Aryan colonisation lies beyond any record of historic beginnings. The civilisation which had already grown up around the Mediterranean Sea while the classic nations were in their infancy, extended its influences not only to what was strictly regarded as transalpine Europe, but beyond the English Channel and the Baltic, centuries before the Rhine and Danube formed the boundary of the Roman world. Voltaire, when treating of the morals and spirit of nations, says: “It is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know.” But it is certainly in his nature, at any rate, to desire much that he does not possess; and the cravings of the rudest outlying tribes of ancient Europe must have been stimulated by many desires of which those of the New World were unconscious till the advent of Europeans in the fifteenth century brought them into contact with a long-matured civilisation.

The archæology of the American continent is, in this respect, at least, simple. Its student is nowhere exposed to misleading or obscuring elements such as baffle the European explorer from the intermingling of relics of widely diverse eras, or even such a succession of arts of the most dissimilar character as Dr. Schliemann found on the site of the classic Ilium. The history of America cannot repeat that of Europe. Its great river-valleys and vast prairies present a totally different condition of things from that in which the distinctive arts, languages, and nationalities of Europe have been matured. The physical geography of the latter with its great central Alpine chain, its highlands, its dividing seas, its peninsulas, and islands, has necessarily fostered isolation; and so has tended to develop the peculiarities of national character, as well as to protect incipient civilisation and immature arts from the constant erasures of barbarism. The steppes of Asia in older centuries proved the nurseries of hordes of rude warriors, powerful only for spoliation. The evidence of the isolation of the nations of Europe in early centuries is unmistakable. Scarcely any feature in the history of the ancient world is more strange to us now than the absence of all direct intercourse between countries separated only by the Alps, or even by the Danube or the Rhine. “The geography of Greek experience, as exhibited by Homer, is limited, speaking generally, to the Ægean and its coasts, with the Propontis as its limit in the north-east; with Crete for a southern boundary; and with the addition of the western coast of the peninsula and its islands as far northwards as the Leucadian rock. The key to the great contrast between the outer geography and the facts of nature lies in the belief of Homer that a great sea occupied the space where we know the heart of the European continent to lie.”^[40] To the early Romans the Celtic nations were known only as warlike nomads whose incursions from beyond the Alpine frontier of their little world were perpetuated in the half-legendary tales of their own national childhood. To the Greek even of the days of Herodotus no more was known of the Gauls or Germans than the rumours brought by seamen and traders whose farthest voyage was to the mouth of the Rhone.

It is, indeed, difficult for us now, amid the intimate relations of the modern world, and the interchange of products of the remotest east and west, to realise a condition of things when the region beyond the Alps was a mystery to the Greek historian, and the very existence of the river Rhine was questioned; or when, four centuries later, the nations around the Baltic, which were before long to supplant the masters of the Roman world, were so entirely unknown to them that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, in one of his letters: “The Roman colonies along the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our own eyes a world of which we know nothing.” Yet such ignorance was not incompatible with indirect intercourse; and was so far from excluding the barbarians beyond the Alps or the Baltic from all the fruits of the civilisation which grew up around the Mediterranean Sea, that the elements of the oldest runic epigraphy of the Goths and Scandinavians are traced to that source; and the stamp of Hellenic influence is apparent in the later runic writing. Moreover the elucidation of European archæology has owed its chief impediment to the difficulty of discriminating between arts of diverse eras and races of northern Europe, intermingled with those of its Neolithic and Bronze periods; or of separating them from the true products of Celtic and classic workmanship.

It is altogether different with American archæology. Were there any traces there of Celtic, Roman, or mediæval European art, the whole tendency of the American mind would be to give even an exaggerated value to their influence. Superficial students of the ruins of Mexico and Central America have misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to what may not inaptly be designated instincts common to the human mind in its first efforts at visible expression of its ideas; and have recognised in them fancied analogies with ancient Egyptian art, or with the mythology and astronomical science of the East. Had, indeed, the more advanced nations of the New World borrowed the arts of Egypt, India, or Greece, the great river highways and the vast unbroken levels of the northern continent presented abundant facilities for their diffusion, with no greater aid than the birch-bark canoe of the northern savage. The copper of Lake Superior was familiar to nations on the banks of the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware. Nor was the influence of southern civilisation wholly inoperative. Reflex traces of the prolific fancy of the Peruvian potter may be detected in the rude ware of the mounds of Georgia and Tennessee; and the conventional art of Yucatan reappears in the ornamentation of the lodges of the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte’s Islands, and in the wood and ivory carvings of the Tawatin and other tribes of British Columbia. Already, moreover, the elaborate native devices which give such distinctive character to the ivory and claystone carvings of the Chimpseyan and Clalam Indians, have been largely superseded by reproductions of European ornamentation, or literal representations of houses, shipping, horses, fire-arms, and other objects brought under the notice of the native artist in his intercourse with white men. We are justified, therefore, in assuming that no long-matured civilisation could have existed in any part of the American continent without leaving, not only abundant evidence of its presence within its own area, but also many traces of its influence far beyond. Yet it cannot be said of the vanished races of the North American continent that they died and made no sign. Their memorials are abundant, and some of their earthworks and burial mounds are on a gigantic scale. But they perpetuate no evidence of a native civilisation of elder times bearing the slightest analogy to that of Europe through all its historic centuries. The western hemisphere stands a world apart, with languages and customs essentially its own; and with man and his arts embraced within greatly narrower limits of development than in any other quarter of the globe, if we except Australia. The evolutionist may, indeed, be tempted by the absence not only of the anthropoid apes, but by all but the lowest families of the Primates, to regard man as a recent intruder on the American continent. But in this, as in the archæologist’s deductions, the term “recent” is a relative one. To whatever source American man may be referred, his relations to the old-world races are sufficiently remote to preclude any theory of geographical distribution within the historic period.

It is not, therefore, adequate time that is wanting for the growth of a native American civilisation. The only satisfactory indication of the affiliation of the American races to those of Asia or Europe, or of Africa, must be sought for in their languages. But any trace of this kind, thus far observed, is at best obscure and remote. The resemblance in physical traits points to affinity with the Asiatic Mongol, and the agglutinate characteristics common to many languages of the continent, otherwise essentially dissimilar, is in harmony with this. But Asiatic affinities are only traceable remotely, not demonstrable on any definite line of descent; and all the evidence that language supplies points to a greatly prolonged period of isolation. The number of languages spoken throughout the whole of North and South America has been estimated to considerably exceed twelve hundred; and on the northern continent alone, more than five hundred distinct languages are spoken, which admit of classification among seventy-five ethnical groups, each with essential linguistic distinctions, pointing to its own parent stock. Some of those languages are merely well-marked dialects, with fully developed vocabularies. Others have more recently acquired a dialectic character in the breaking up and scattering of dismembered tribes, and present a very limited range of vocabulary, suited to the intellectual requirements of a small tribe, or band of nomads. The prevailing condition of life throughout the whole North American continent was peculiarly favourable to the multiplication of such dialects, and their growth into new languages, owing to the constant dismemberment of tribes, and the frequent adoption into their numbers of the refugees from other fugitive broken tribes, leading to an intermingling of vocabularies and fresh modifications of speech.

But, by whatever means we seek to account for the great diversity of speech among the communities of the New World, it is manifest that language furnishes no evidence of recent intrusion, or of contact for many generations with Asiatic or other races. On any theory of origin either of race or language, a greatly prolonged period is indispensable to account for the actual condition of things which presents such a tempting field for the study of the ethnologist. Among the various races brought under notice, the Huron-Iroquois of Canada and the neighbouring states most fitly represent the North American race east of the Rocky Mountains. Their language, subdivided into many dialects, furnishes indications of migrations throughout the greater portion of that area eastward between the Mississippi and the Atlantic seaboard, and its affinities have been sought for beyond the American continent. Mr. Horatio Hale, an experienced philologist familiar with the races and languages most nearly akin to those of the New World, in his Indian Migrations, as evidenced by Language, after remarking that there is nothing in the languages of the American Indians to favour the conjecture of an origin from Eastern Asia, thus proceeds: “But in Western Europe one community is known to exist, speaking a language which in its general structure manifests a near likeness to the Indian tongues. Alone of all the races of the old continent the Basques or Euskarians, of northern Spain and south-western France, have a speech of that highly complex and polysynthetic character which distinguishes the American languages.” But to this he has to add the statement that “there is not, indeed, any such positive similarity in words or grammar as would prove a direct affiliation. The likeness is merely in the general cast and mould of speech, but this likeness is so marked as to have awakened much attention.”^[41]

Assuming the affinity thus based on a general likeness in cast and mould of speech to be well founded, there need be no surprise at the lack of any positive similarity in words or grammar; for, used only as a test of the intervening time since Basque and Red Indian parted, it points to representatives of a prehistoric race that occupied Europe before the advent of Celtic or other Aryan pioneer, long prior to the historic dawn. And if the intervening centuries between that undetermined date and the close of the fifteenth century, when intercourse was once more renewed between the Iberian peninsula and the transatlantic continent, sufficed for the evolution of all the classic, mediæval, and renaissance phases of civilisation in Europe, what was man doing through all those centuries in this New World? A period of time would appear to have transpired ample enough for the development of a native civilisation; but neither the languages nor the arts of the Indian nations found in occupation of the northern continent reveal traces of it; nor does archæology disclose to us evidence of civilised precursors. Whatever their origin may have been, the Red Indian appears to have remained for unnumbered centuries excluded by ocean barriers from all influence of the historic races. But on this very account an inquiry into the history of the nations of the American continent, in so far as this may be recoverable from archæological or other evidence, may simplify important ethnical problems, and contribute results of some value in reference to the condition and progress of primeval man elsewhere.

In Europe man can be studied only as he has been moulded by a thousand external influences, and by the intermixture of many dissimilar races. The most recent terms of ethnological classification, the Xanthocroi and Melanochroi, are based on the assumed interblending of widely dissimilar races in times long anterior to any definite chronology. There was a time, as is assumed, when the sparsely peopled areas of Europe were occupied by a population still imperfectly represented by the Finns, the Lapps, and the Basques. Those are supposed to be surviving fragments of a once homogeneous population in prehistoric centuries. On this the great Aryan migration intruded in successive waves of Celtic, Slavic, Hellenic and Teutonic invaders, not without considerable intermixture of blood. Such is the great ethnical revolution by which it is assumed that Europe was recolonised from the same source from whence India and Persia derived their ancient civilised and lettered races. The Finnic hypothesis, and the once favoured idea of an Asiatic cradleland for the whole so-called Aryan races, have been greatly modified by later research. Community of language is no longer accepted as necessarily involving a common ethnic origin. But the results in no way affect the general conclusion as to the displacement of a succession of barbarous races by the historic races of Europe long before the Christian era.

The year 1492 marks the beginning of an analogous ethnical revolution by which the Aryan, or Indo-European stock intruded, in ever-increasing numbers, on the aboriginal populations of the New World. The disparity between the first Celtic or other Aryan immigrants into Europe and the aborigines whom they encountered there was probably less than that which separated the first American colonists from the Red Indian savages whom they displaced. In both cases it was the meeting of cultured races with rude nomads whom they were prone to regard with an aversion or contempt very different from the repellent elements between conquering and subject nations in near equality to each other. The disparity, for example, between the native Briton and the intruding Saxon, or between the later Anglo-Saxon and the intruding Dane or Northman, was sufficiently slight to admit of ready intermixture, ultimately, in spite of their bitter antagonism. Nor was even the civilised Roman separated by any such gulf from the Gaul or German who bowed to the Imperial yoke, and exchanged their independence for Roman citizenship. But other elements have also to be kept in view. The pioneers of emigration are not, as a rule, the most cultured members of the intruding race; while the disparity in the relative numbers of the sexes inevitably resulting from the conditions under which any extensive migration takes place forms an effective counterpoise to very wide ethnical differences. In every case of extensive immigration, with the excess of males and chiefly of hardy young adventurers, the same result is inevitable. On the American continent it has already produced a numerous race of half-breeds, descendants of white and Indian parentage, apart from that other and not less interesting “coloured race,” now numbering upwards of six millions in the United States alone, the descendants of European and African parentage. In the older provinces of Canada, the remnants of the aboriginal Indian tribes have been gathered on suitable reserves; and on many of these, so far are they from hastening to extinction, that during the last quarter of a century the returns of the Indian Department show a steady numerical increase. In the United States, under less favourable circumstances, similar results are beginning to be recognised. In a report on “Indian Civilisation and Education,” dated Washington, November 24, 1877, it is set forth as more and more tending to assume the aspect of an established fact, “that the Indians, instead of being doomed to extinction within a limited period, are, as a rule, not decreasing in numbers; and are, in all probability, destined to form a permanent factor; an enduring element of our population.” Wherever the aborigines have been gathered together upon suitable reserves, and trained to industrious habits, as among the Six Nation Indians, settled on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario; or where they have mingled on terms of equality with the white settlers, as within the old Hudson’s Bay territory on the Red river, they have after a time showed indications of endurance. It is not a mere intermingling of white and Indian settlers, but the increase of the community by the growth of a half-breed population; and when this takes place under favourable circumstances, as was notably the case so long as the hunter tribes of the prairies and the trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company shared the great North-West as a common hunting-ground, the results are altogether favourable to the endurance of the mixed race. On a nearly similar footing we may conceive of the admixture of the earliest Aryans with the Allophylians of Europe, resulting in some of the most noticeable types of modern European nationalities. The growth in the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company of a numerous half-breed population, assuming the status of farming hunters, distinct alike from the Indians and the Whites, is a fact of singular interest to the ethnologist. It has been the result of alliances, chiefly with Indian Cree women, by the fur trappers of the region. But these included two distinct elements: the one a Scottish immigration, chiefly from the Orkney Islands; the other that of the French Canadians, who long preceded the English as hunters and trappers in the North-West. The contrasting Scottish and French paternity reveals itself in the hybrid offspring; but in both cases the half-breeds are a large and robust race, with greater powers of endurance than the pure-blood Indian. They have been described to me by more than one trustworthy observer as “superior in every respect, both mentally and physically,” and this is confirmed by my own experience. The same opinion has been expressed by nearly all who have paid special attention to the hybrid races of the New World. D’Orbigny, when referring to the general result of this intermingling of races says: “Among the nations in America the product is always superior to the two types that are mixed.” Henry, a traveller of the last century, who spent six years among the North American Indians, notes the confirmatory assurance given to him by a Cristineaux chief, that “the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.” Finally, of the hardy race of the Arctic circle Dr. Kane says: “The half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux in their powers of endurance.” There is also a fine race in Greenland, half Danes; and Dr. Rae informs me that numerous half-breed Eskimo are to be met with on the Labrador coast. They are taller and more hardy than the pure-blooded Eskimo; so that he always gave the preference to them as his guides. The Danish half-breeds are described by Dr. Henry Rink, in his Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, as dating back to the earliest times of the colonisation of Greenland. The mixed marriages, he says, “have generally been rich in offspring. The children for the most part grow up as complete Greenlanders”; but the distinction between them and the native Eskimo is unmistakable, although individuals of the hybrid offspring represent the mixture of European and native blood in almost every possible proportion.

From the conquest of Mexico in 1520, and of Peru in 1534, this admixture of races of the Old and the New World has been going on in varying ratio according to the relative circumstances under which they meet. In Mexico and in the more civilised portions of South America the half-breeds are estimated to constitute fully one-fifth of the whole population, while the so-called “coloured people,” the descendants of European and African parentage, now number not less than fifteen millions throughout the mainland and the Islands of North and South America.

Throughout the northern, southern, and western states of America, on the Pacific slope, and in Canada, the growth of a mixed race of White and Indian blood has everywhere taken place in the first period of settlement, when the frontier backwoodsman and the hunter were brought into contact with the native tribes. Along the borders of every frontier state a nearly exclusive male population is compelled to accept the services of the Indian women in any attempt at domestic life. The children grow up to share in perfect equality the rude life of their fathers. The new generation presents a mixed race of hardy trappers, mingling the aptitudes of both races in the wild life of the frontier. With the increase of population, and the more settled life of the clearing, the traces of mixed blood are lost sight of; but it is to a large extent only a repetition of what appears to have marked the advent of the Aryan immigrants into Europe. The new, but more civilised race predominated. Literal extermination, no doubt, did its work, and the aborigines to a large extent perished. But no inconsiderable remnant finally disappeared by absorption into the general stock; not without leaving enduring evidence of the process in the Melanochroi, or dark whites—the Iberians, or Black Celts, as they are sometimes styled,—of Western Europe; as well as in the allied type, not only of the Mediterranean shores, but of Western Asia and Persia. A process has thus been going on on the American continent for four centuries, which cannot fail to beget new types in the future; even as a like process is seen to have produced them under analogous conditions in ancient Europe.

Viewed in this aspect, the archæology and ethnology of the New World presents in some important respects a startling analogy to pre-Aryan Europe. Assuredly the status of the Allophylian races of Europe can scarcely have been inferior to that of some, at least, of the aborigines of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Probably the Aryan pioneers were fully equal to its first European immigrants. But if the ethnical characteristics of American man are simple, and the aspect of his social life appears to realise for us a living analogy to that of Europe’s Neolithic, if not in some respects to that of its Palæolithic era, the question of his antiquity acquires a new interest; for it thus becomes apparent that man may remain through countless ages in the wild hunter stage, as unprogressive as any other denizen of the wilderness propagating its species and hunting for its prey. But the whole question of the antiquity of man has undergone a marvellous revolution. The literature of modern geology curiously illustrates its progress, from the date of the publication of Dean Buckland’s Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, in 1823, to the final edition of Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, in 1872, and the latest embodiment of his conclusions on the special question involved in his Antiquity of Man.

The determination of a Palæolithic period for Europe, with its rude implements of flint or stone, chipped into shape without the aid of any grinding or polishing process, and belonging to an era when man was associated with animals either extinct or known only throughout the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, has naturally stimulated the research of American archæologists for corresponding traces on this continent. Nor is the anticipation of the possible recovery of the traces of man’s presence in post-glacial, or still earlier epochs in unhistoric areas, limited to either continent. If it be accepted as an established fact that man has existed in Europe for unnumbered ages, during which enormous physical changes have been wrought; upheaval and denudation have revolutionised the face of the continent; the deposition of the whole drift formation has been effected; the river-valleys of Southern England and the north of France have been excavated, and the British Islands detached from the neighbouring continent: it cannot be regarded as improbable that evidence may yet be found of the early presence of man in any region of the globe. Nevertheless some of the elements already referred to tend to mark with a character of their own the investigations alike of the archæologist and the geologist into the earliest traces of human art in what we have learned habitually to speak of as a New World. In Europe the antiquary, familiar already with ancient historic remains, had passed by a natural transition to the study of ruder examples of primitive art in stone and bronze, as well as to the physical characteristics of races which appeared to have preceeded the earliest historic nations. The occupation of the British Islands, for example, successively by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, was so familiar to the popular mind that the problem of a sequence of neolithic, bronze, and the ruder iron implements with their correlated personal ornaments, pottery, etc., was universally solved by referring them to Celtic, Roman, and Scandinavian art. Erroneous as this interpretation of the evidence proves to have been, it had, nevertheless, sufficient accordance with truth to prepare the way for the ultimate reception of more accurate inductions. The fact of the occurrence of successive phases of art, and their indication of a succession of races, were undoubted; and researches directed to the solution of the problem of European archæology were unhesitatingly followed up through mediæval, classical, Assyrian and Egyptian remains, to the very threshold of that prehistoric dawn which forms the transitional stage between geological and historical epochs. A significant fact, in its bearing on the recent disclosures of the river-drift in France and England, is that some of the most characteristic flint implements, such as a large spear head found along with the remains of a fossil elephant in Gray’s Inn Lane, London, and implements of the same type obtained from the drift of the Waveney Valley, in Surrey, underlying similar fossil remains, had been brought under the notice of archæologists upwards of a century before the idea of the contemporaneous existence of man and the mammals of the Drift found any favour; and they were unhesitatingly assigned to a Celtic origin. The first known discovery of any flint implement in the quaternary gravels of Europe is the one already noted which stands recorded in the Sloane catalogue as “A British weapon found, with elephant’s tooth, opposite to black Mary’s, near Grayes Inn Lane.”

A just conception of the comprehensiveness even of historical antiquity was long retarded in Europe by an exclusive devotion to classical studies; but the relations of America to the Old World are so recent, and all else is so nearly a blank, that for it the fifteenth century is the historic dawn, and everything dating before the landing of Columbus has been habitually assigned to the same vague antiquity. Hence historical research has been occupied for the most part on very modern remains, and the supreme triumph long aimed at has been to associate the hieroglyphics of Central America, and the architectural monuments of Peru, with those of Egypt. But we have entered on a new era of archæological and historical inquiry. The palæolithic implements of the French Drift have only been brought to light in our own day; and, though upwards of half a century has elapsed since the researches of Mr. J. MacEnery were rewarded by the discovery of flint implements of the earliest type in the same red loam of the Devonshire limestone caves which embedded bones of the mammoth, tichorhine rhinoceros, cave-bear and other extinct mammals, it is only recently that the full significance of such disclosures has been recognised.

America was indeed little behind Europe in the earlier stages of cavern research. A cabinet of the British Museum is filled with fossil bones obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from limestone caverns in Brazil, embedded in a reddish-coloured loam, under a thick stalagmitic flooring, and including, along with remains of genera still inhabiting the American continent, those of extinct monkeys. Human bones were also found in the same caves, but superficially, and seemingly of the present Indian race. But a fresh interest and significance have been given to such researches by the novel aspect of prehistoric archæology in Europe. The relations now established between the earliest traces of European man and the geological aspects of the great Drift formation, have naturally led to the diligent examination of corresponding deposits of the continent of America, in the hope of recovering similar traces there. Until recently, however, any supposed examples of American palæolithic art have been isolated and unsatisfactory. Colonel Charles C. Jones, in his Antiquities of the Southern Indians, notes the discovery in the Nacoochee valley, in the State of Georgia, of flint implements from the gravel and boulders of the drift, and in material, manner of construction, and appearance closely resembling the rough hatchets belonging to the Drift type. Other more or less trustworthy examples of a like kind have been reported; among which may be noted a large specimen, now in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, found at Lewiston, in the State of New York, at a great depth, when sinking a well. Implements of neolithic character, and even of modern type, have been produced, not only from Kansas and California gold-diggings, but from the volcanic tufa of the Pacific coast, overlaid by repeated volcanic deposits. In a terrace of modified drift, near Little Falls, Minnesota, an accumulation of quartz chips have been found; the supposed refuse of an ancient workshop. More definitely, Professor Aughey reports the discovery of rudely chipped flint arrow heads in the loess of the Missouri valley, beneath the bones of the mastodon; and the loess gravels of Ohio and Indiana, belonging unquestionably to the last glacial age, have disclosed what seem to be genuine palæoliths, pointing to the presence of the rational tool-maker during the close of the quaternary epoch of the North American continent.

Some of those assumed illustrations of American palæolithic art cannot be accepted. One implement, for example, from the Californian gravel-drift, is a polished stone plummet perforated at one end, and not only modern in character, but as a genuine discovery in the gold-bearing gravels, tending to discredit the palæolithic origin assigned to ruder implements found under similar circumstances. But the most startling examples of this class are of minor importance when compared with reported discoveries of human remains in the Californian drift. In 1857, Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface in the “pay drift” at Table Mountain, associated with remains of the mastodon and fossil elephant. From beds underlying the lava and volcanic tufa of California, from time to time other evidences of the assumed ancient presence of man and traces of his art are produced. But the manifestly recent character of some of the latter prove the disturbance of these deposits by subsequent influences. In 1869 Professor J. D. Whitney exhibited, at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a complete human skull, recovered at a depth of 130 feet in the auriferous gravel of Calaveras County, California, underlying five successive beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and vouched for its geological antiquity. The gravel which adhered to the relic found imbedded in it is referred by him to the Pliocene age; and Dr. J. W. Foster remarks of it, in his Prehistoric Races of the United States: “This skull, admitting its authenticity, carries back the advent of man to the Pliocene epoch, and is therefore older than the stone implements of the drift-gravel of Abbeville and Amiens, or the relics furnished by the cave-dirt of Belgium and France.” In reality, however, the authenticity of the skull as a pliocene relic cannot be admitted. Like that of Guadaloupe, those found by Dr. Lund in the Brazil caves, and other fossil skulls of the American continent, it proved, according to the trustworthy report of Dr. Wyman, to be of the ordinary Indian type; though to some minds that only confirms the genuineness of the discovery. A human skull recovered from the delta of the Mississippi at New Orleans, and estimated by Dr. Dowler—on what, “to avoid all cavil,” he claimed to be extremely moderate assumptions,—as not less than 57,000 years old, is grouped with others found by Dr. Lund in one of the Brazil caves, at Logoa Santa, and thus commented on: “Numerous species of animals have been blotted from creation since American humanity’s first appearance. The form of these crania, moreover, proves that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the Columbian discovery”;^[42] and so the authors of Types of Mankind arrived at the conclusion that with such evidence of the native American type having occupied the continent in geological times, before the formation of the Mississippi alluvia, science may spare itself the trouble of looking elsewhere for the origin of the American race! The high authority of Professor Agassiz was adduced at the time in support of this and other equally crude assumptions; but they have ceased to receive the countenance of men of science.

Meanwhile the progress of European discovery has familiarised us with the idea of the rude primeval race of its Palæolithic era, so designated in reference to their characteristic implements recovered from the river-drift of France and England, and from the sedimentary accumulations of their rock shelters and limestone caves. That flint and stone implements of every variety of form abound in the soil of the New World, has been established by ample proof; and if mere rudeness could be accepted as evidence of antiquity, many of them rival in this respect the rudest implements of the European drift. But it has to be kept in view that the indigenous tribes of America have scarcely even now abandoned the manufacture of implements of obsidian, flint, and stone, or of bone and ivory. So striking, indeed, is the analogy between the simple arts of the palæolithic cave-men of Southern France, and those still practised by the Eskimo, that Professor Boyd Dawkins inferred from this conclusive evidence of a pedigree for the Arctic aborigines little less ancient than that which Dr. Dowler long ago deduced from his discovery in the delta of the Mississippi. The implements and accumulated debris of the ancient hunters of the Garonne, the contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct mammals, and of the reindeer, musk-sheep, cave-bear, and other species known only within the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, undoubtedly suggest interesting analogies with the modern Eskimo. Only under similar climatic conditions to those in which they now live, could such accumulations of animal remains as have been found in the caves of the valley of the Vésère be possible in places habitually resorted to by man. But such analogies form a very slender basis on which to found the hypothesis that the race of the Mammoth and Reindeer period in the remote Post-Pliocene era of Southern France has its living representatives within the Arctic circle of the American continent.

The students of modern archæology have become familiar with startling disclosures; and the supposed identification of living representatives of the race of the pleistocene river beds or cave deposits is too fascinating a one to be readily abandoned by its originator. The men of the River-Drift era are assumed to have been a race of still older and ruder savages than the palæolithic cave-men, who were more restricted in their range, and considerably in advance of them in the variety and workmanship of their weapons and implements. The elder ruder race has vanished; but the cave-race of that indefinite but vastly remote era of pliocene, or post-pliocene Europe, is imagined to still survive within the Arctic frontiers of Canada.

In discussing the plausible hypothesis which thus aims at recovering in the hyperboreans of America the race that before the close of Europe’s Pleistocene age, hunted the mammoth, the musk-sheep, and the reindeer in the valleys of the Garonne, Professor Dawkins reviewed the manners and habits of the Eskimo as a race of hunters, fishers, and fowlers, accumulating round their dwellings vast refuse heaps similar to those of the ancient cave-men. Both were ignorant of the metallurgic arts, were excluded to a large extent by a like rigorous climate from access to stone or flint; while they habitually turned to account the available material, resulting from the spoils of the chase: bone, ivory, and deer’s horn, in the manufacture of all needful tools. The implements and weapons thus common to both do unquestionably prove that their manner of life was in many respects similar. Professor Dawkins also notes, what can scarcely seem surprising in any people familiar with the working in bone, namely, the use at times by the Eskimo of fossil mammoth ivory for the handles of their stone scrapers, and adds: “It is very possible that this habit of the Eskimos may have been handed down from the late pleistocene times.” But what strikes him as “the most astonishing bond of union between the cave-men and the Eskimo is the art of representing animals”; and, after noting those familiar to both, along with the correspondence in their weapons, and habits as hunters, he says: “All these points of connection between the cave-men and the Eskimos can, in my opinion, be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race.”^[43]

As to the ingenious imitative art of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, it is by no means peculiar to them and the modern Eskimo; but, on the contrary, is common to many savage races; though by no modern savage people has a like degree of artistic ability been shown. Professor Dawkins says truly of the cave-man: “He possessed a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted; and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much inferior to that which is the result of long-continued civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced, with his imperfect means, at one time foliage, at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding, has left behind him the proof of a decided advance in culture, such as might be expected to result from the long continuance of man on the earth in the hunter state of civilisation.”^[44] All this is correct in reference to the art of the Vézère carvers and draughtsmen; but it would be gross exaggeration if applied to such conventional art as the Eskimo arrow-straightener which Professor Dawkins figures, with its formal row of reindeer and their grotesque accessories. The same criticism is equally applicable to numerous other specimens of Eskimo art, and to similar Innuit, or western Eskimo representations of hunting scenes, such as those figured by Mr. William H. Dall, in his Alaska, which he describes as “drawings analogous to those discovered in France in the caves of Dordogne.”^[45]

The identity, or near resemblance between harpoons, fowling spears, marrow spoons, and scrapers, of the ancient cave-race of pleistocene France, and implements of the modern Eskimo, is full of interest; as is much also of a like kind between savage races of our own day in the most widely severed regions of the globe; but it is a slender basis on which to found such far-reaching deductions. The old race that lived on the verge of the great glaciers in Southern France gave the preference to bone and ivory over flint or stone, because the climatic conditions under which they lived rendered those most accessible to them; and we see in the familiar types of flint arrow heads, stone hammers, and the like primitive tools of savage man, both in ancient and modern times, how naturally the workman, with the same materials and similar necessities, shapes his few and simple weapons and implements into like form. As to the absence of pottery, alike among the ancient cave-dwellers and the modern Eskimo, in which another element of resemblance is traced, it proves no more than that both had to work under climatic conditions which rendered clay, adequate fuel, and nearly all other appliances of the potter, even less available than flint and stone.

But the caves of the Vézère have furnished examples not only of skulls, but of complete skeletons of an ancient race of cave-dwellers, whether that of the ingenious draughtsmen and reindeer hunters or not; and had those, or the underlying debris, yielded traces of the Eskimo type of head, there would then be good reason for attaching an exceptional value to any evidence of correspondence in arts and habits. But the cerebral capacity of this Cro-Magnon race amply accords with the artistic skill, and the sense of beauty and grace of natural form, ascribed to the ancient draughtsmen; and their well-developed skulls and large bones present the most striking contrast to the stunted Eskimo. The strongly marked physiognomy of the former bears no resemblance to the debased Mongolian type of the latter. No doubt it may be argued with sufficient plausibility that in the slow retreat of the palæolithic race, whether eastward by the river-valleys of Europe, and across the steppes of Asia, to Behring Strait; or over submerging continents, since engulfed in the ocean; and in the vast æons of their retreat to their latest home in another hemisphere, on the verge of the pole, any amount of change may have modified the physical characteristics of the race. But if so, the evidence of their pedigree is no longer producible. The Eskimo may be related by descent to the men of the French Reindeer period, as we ourselves may be descendants of palæolithic man; but, as Professor Geikie has justly remarked: “When anthropologists produce from some of the caves occupied by the reindeer hunters a cranium resembling that of the living Eskimo, it will be time enough to admit that the latter has descended from the former. But, unfortunately for the view here referred to, none of the skulls hitherto found affords it any support.”^[46] In truth, the plausible fancy that the discoveries of the last twenty-five years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-men with the Eskimo, only requires the full appreciation of all that it involves, in order that it shall take its place with that other identification with the red man of the present day of “Dr. Dowler’s sub-cypress Indian who dwelt on the site of New Orleans 57,000 years ago.”

The received interpretation of the imperfect record which remains to us of the successive eras of geological change with the accompanying modifications of animal life, down to the appearance of man, and the deciphering of geological chroniclings as a coherent disclosure of the past history of the earth, are largely due to Sir Charles Lyell. In 1841 he visited America, and then estimated with cautious conservatism some of the evidences adduced for the assumed antiquity of American man. But subsequent observations led him to modify his views; and at length, in 1863, he “read his recantation” of earlier opinions; and—so far at least as Europe is concerned,—gave the full weight of his authority to the conclusions relative to the antiquity of man based on the discovery of flint implements associated with bones of extinct mammalia at Abbeville and in the valley of the Thames. The peculiar geological conditions accompanying the earliest evidence of the presence of palæolithic man in Europe proved, when rightly interpreted, to be no less convincing than the long-familiar sequence of more recent archæological indices by which antiquarian speculation has proceeded step by step back towards that prehistoric dawn in which geology and archæology meet on common ground. The chalk and the overlying river-drift, abounding with flint nodules, left no room for question as to the source of the raw material from which the primitive implements were manufactured. The flint is still abundant as ever, in nodules of a size amply sufficient for furnishing the largest palæoliths, in the localities both of France and England where such specimens of primitive art have been recovered by thousands. But there also other disclosures tell no less conclusively of many subsequent stages of progress, alike in prehistoric and historic times.

Sir John Evans, in his Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain, purposely begins with the more recent implements, including those of the Australian and other modern savage races, and traces his way backward, “ascending the stream of time,” and noting the diverse examples of ingeniously fashioned and polished tools of the Neolithic age which preceded that palæolithic class, of vast antiquity and rudest workmanship, which now constitute the earliest known works of man; if they are not, indeed, examples of the first infantile efforts of human skill. But alike in Britain, and on the neighbouring continent, a chronological sequence of implements in stone and metal, with pottery, personal ornaments, and other illustrations of progressive art, supplies the evidence by means of which we are led backward—not without some prolonged interruptions, as we approach the Palæolithic age,—from historic to the remotest prehistoric times.

The relative chronology of the European drift may be thus stated: first, and most modern, the superficial deposits of recent centuries with their mediæval traces of Frank and Gaul; and along with those, the tombs, the pottery, and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of the Christian era; next, in the alluvium, seemingly embedded by natural accumulation at an average depth of fifteen feet, occur remains of a European Stone period, corresponding in many respects to those of the pfahlbauten, or pile villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, underlying such accumulations exceeding in their duration the whole historical period, we come at length to the tool-bearing drift, imbedding, along with the fossil remains of many extinct mammals, the implements of palæolithic man, fashioned seemingly when the rivers were only beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England.

There, as elsewhere, we recognise progression from the most artless rudeness of tool manufacture, belonging to an epoch when the process of grinding flint or stone to an edge appears to have been unknown; through various stages of the primitive worker in stone, bone, ivory, and the like natural products; and then the discovery and gradual development of the metallurgic arts. Yet at the same time it must not be lost sight of that mere rudeness of workmanship is no evidence of antiquity. Nothing can well be conceived of more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Moreover, it is to be noted that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, with its analogies so suggestive of a condition of life corresponding to that of the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making now occur. In a report of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements, rude as any in the Drift, observed by him while engaged on a survey at the base of the Unitah Mountains in Southern Wyoming. “In some places,” he remarks, “the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”^[47] But with these, others are mingled of fine finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region seem to be incapable of such skill as the latter imply; and express the belief that they were a gift of the Great Spirit to their ancestors. Yet many are fresh in appearance; though others are worn and decomposed on the surface, and may, as Professor Leidy assumes, have lain there for centuries. The tendency is now, even among experienced archæologists, to assume that they are actually palæolithic. Mr. Thomas Wilson remarks, in his Report of 1887: “Dr. Leidy did not know these implements to be what they really were, that is implements of the Palæolithic period.”^[48] But in view of Dr. Leidy’s whole narrative, his assumption seems to be more consistent with the observed data. In the same narrative he describes a stone scraper, or teshoa, as the Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of buffalo-skins, but of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the characteristics of a like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Sir John Evans figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the Indians of Rio Frio in Texas. Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention as of artificial working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought to light in any drift or cave deposit.^[49] Another modern Texas implement, in the Smithonnia collections at Washington,^[50] is a rudely-fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift.

So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship are concerned, it might be assumed that the aborigines of America are thus presented to our study in their most primitive stage. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the European savage of the River-Drift period, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in their rude arts seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence of progression. So far as anything could be learned from their work, they might have entered on the occupation of the northern continent, subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and, indeed, American archæologists generally favour the opinion that the Skrælings, as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom they encountered, were not Red Indians but Eskimo. But whatever may have been the local distribution of races at that date, geological evidence, which has proved so conclusive in relation to European ethnology, has at length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which seem to establish for their continent also its primeval Stone period, and remote prehistoric dawn.

The Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology for 1877, gave the first publicity to a communication from Dr. Charles C. Abbott, setting forth the data from which he was led to assume that man existed on the American continent during the formation of the great glacial deposit which extends from Labrador as far south as Virginia. The scene of his successful research is in the valley of the Delaware, near Trenton, New Jersey. Though the relative antiquity of the Trenton gravel beds is modern compared with some subsequent disclosures, his discoveries have a special interest as foremost among those of implement-bearing gravels in the New World. In the gravel, deposited by the Delaware river in the process of excavating the valley through which its course now lies, Dr. Abbott’s diligent search has been rewarded by finding numerous specimens of rudely chipped implements of a peculiar type, to which he has given the name of “turtle-back celts.” They are fashioned of a highly indurated argillite, with a conchoidal fracture, and have been recovered at depths varying from five to upwards of twenty feet below the overlying soil, in the undisturbed gravel of the bluff facing the Delaware river, as well as in railway cuttings and other excavations.

Here, to all appearance, intelligent research had at length been rewarded by the discovery of undoubted traces of the American palæolithic man; and Dr. Abbott, not unnaturally, gave free scope to his fancy, as he realised to himself the preoccupation of the river valley with “the village sites of pre-glacial man.” There is a fascination in such disclosures which, especially in the case of the original discoverer, tempts to extreme views; and both in France and England, at the present time, the more eager among the geologists and archæologists devoted to this inquiry are reluctantly restrained from assuming as a scientific fact the existence of man in Southern England and in France under more genial climatic influences, prior to the great Ice age which wrought such enormous changes there. The theory which Dr. Abbott formed on the basis of the evidence first presented to him by the disclosures of the Trenton gravel may be thus stated. Towards the close of the great Ice age, the locality which has rewarded his search for specimens of palæolithic art marked the termination of the glacier on the Atlantic coast. Here, at the foot of the glacier, a primitive people, in a condition closely analogous to that of the Eskimo of the present day, made their home, and wandered over the open sea in the vicinity, during the accumulation of the deposit from the melting glacier. But this drift-gravel was modified by subsequent action. According to Dr. Abbott’s conclusions, it was deposited in open water, on the bed of a shallow sea. But the position of the large boulders, and the absence of true clay in the mass, suggest that it has undergone great changes since its original deposition as glacial debris; and if this is to be accounted for by subsequent action of water, the unpolished surfaces of the chipped implements are inconsistent with such a theory of their origin. Huge boulders, of the same character as those which abound in the underlying gravel, occur on the surface; and their presence there was referred to by Dr. Abbott as throwing light upon “the occurrence of rude implements identical with those found in the underlying gravels, inasmuch as the same ice-raft that bore the one, with its accompanying sand and gravel, might well gather up also stray relics of this primitive people, and re-deposit them where they are now found.” Accordingly, seeking in fancy to recall this ancient past, he says in his first report: “In times preceding the formation of this gravel bed, now in part facing the Delaware river, there were doubtless localities, once the village sites of pre-glacial man, where these rude stone implements would necessarily be abundant,” and he accordingly asks “May not the ice in its onward march, gathering in bulk every loose fragment of rock and particle of soil, have held them loosely together, and, hundreds of miles from their original site, left them in some one locality such as this, where the river has again brought to light rude implements that characterise an almost primitive people? But, assuming that the various implements fashioned by a strictly pre-glacial people have been totally destroyed by the crushing forces of the glacier, and that the specimens now produced were not brought from a distance, may they not be referred to an early race that, driven southward by the encroaching ice, dwelt at the foot of the glacier, and during their sojourn here these implements were lost?”^[51]

The opinions thus set forth in the first published account of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries, have since been considerably modified, in so far as the geological age of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware valley is concerned. In his earlier publications he assumed, as no longer questionable, the existence of inter-glacial, if not pre-glacial, man on the continent. In his more matured views, as set forth in his Primitive Industry, he speaks of “having been seriously misled by the various geological reports that purport to give, in proper sequence, the respective ages of the several strata of clay, gravel, boulders, and sand, through which the river has finally worn its channel to the ocean level”;^[52] so that he has probably ascribed too great an antiquity to the peculiar class of stone implements brought to light in the river-gravels of New Jersey. Dr. Abbott, accordingly, states as his more matured conclusion, confirmed by the reports of some of the most experienced geological observers, on whose judgment he relies, that the Trenton gravel, in which alone the turtle-back celts have thus far been found, is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than at present; and is the most recent of all the formations of the Delaware.^[53] Here, however, the term “recent” is employed altogether relatively; and although Dr. Abbott no longer claims in the discovery of the stone implements of the gravel beds near Trenton, New Jersey, evidence of the existence of man on the American continent before the close of the Glacial period, he still refers the Trenton gravel tool-makers to an era which, at the lowest computation, precedes by thousands of years the earliest historical glimpses of Assyria, Egypt, or wherever among the most ancient nations of the Old World the beginnings of history can be traced.

The disclosures of Dr. Abbott claim a special importance among the fruits of archæological investigation on the American continent, not only from the fact that they furnish the first well-authenticated results of systematic research based on the scientific analogies of European archæology, but these later results have included the remains of man himself. When Dr. Usher of Mobile contributed to The Types of Mankind an account of the discovery of a human skeleton at New Orleans, found under circumstances from which the existence of man in the delta of the Mississippi was deduced well nigh sixty thousand years ago, it was scarcely calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of that assumption when it was added that “the type of the cranium was, as might have been expected, that of the aboriginal American race.” Nor is this the only example of skull of a strictly modern Indian type from which the inference has been drawn that the same unchanging form has prevailed from the era of pre-glacial American man till now. Three human crania found in the Trenton gravel are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge (Harvard). All are of the same type, but it differs essentially from that of the Red Indian skull. They are of small size, oval, and present a striking contrast to all other skulls in the Peabody collection. Their value is due to the fact of their discovery in the implement-bearing gravel, in proximity to the characteristic examples of what are assumed to be palæolithic celts. For it is well for us to bear in remembrance that the evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe do not rest on any number of chance disclosures. It is a simple procedure to dig into a Celtic or Saxon barrow, and find there the implements and pottery of its builders lying alongside of their buried remains. But archæologists have learned to recognise the palæolithic implements as not less characteristic of certain post-pliocene deposits than the palæontology of the same geological formation. The river-drift and cave deposits are characterised by traces of contemporaneous life, as shown in the examples of primitive art from which they receive the name of the tool-bearing drift or gravel; just as older geological formations have their characteristic animal and vegetable fossils. The specific character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French Drift having been determined, geologists and archæologists have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossils of the same period, and with like success. Palæolithic implements have been recovered in this manner in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and other districts in the south of England. So entirely indeed has the man of the Drift passed beyond the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his Notes on Further Discoveries of Flint Implements in Beds of Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay, with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay pits or gravel beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found; and subsequent discoveries confirmed his anticipations. It has been by the application of the same principle to the drift and river-valley gravels of the New World that a like success has been achieved. The result of a careful study of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware may be thus summarised from recent reports of trustworthy scientific observers. The Trenton gravel is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than its present volume. It represents apparently the latest of the surface deposits of the upper Delaware valley;^[54] and Dr. Abbott remarks of it: “The melting of a local glacier in the Cattskill Mountains would probably result, at the headwaters of the Delaware, in a continued flood of sufficient volume, if supplemented by the action of floating ice, to form the Trenton gravels.”^[55] But these gravels are now recognised as the youngest of the series of ancient implement-bearing deposits. Underneath lies the older Columbia gravel, which has also yielded—though in much fewer numbers,—palæoliths of primitive types. The researches of Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the State of Delaware have already been referred to; and from those results, as well as from similar disclosures in Ohio and Indiana, it is no longer doubted that reliable traces have been recovered of American man contemporary with the mammoth and the mastodon; and—like the old cave-dwellers of Cro-Magnon,—a hunter of the reindeer in the valley of the Delaware.

American archæologists have undoubtedly been repeatedly deceived by the misleading traces of comparatively modern remains in deposits of some geological antiquity; as in instances already referred to in the California gravel beds. In these, indeed, ground and polished instruments of stone, including a “plummet” of highly polished syenite, “an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent,”^[56] are produced from time to time from the same post-pliocene formation where the remains of the elephant and mastodon abound. Dr. Abbott did not overlook the danger to which the archæologist is thus exposed on a continent which, so far as its aborigines are concerned, has scarcely yet emerged from its Stone age. He accordingly remarked in his original report: “The chance occurrence of single specimens of the ordinary forms of Indian relics, at depths somewhat greater than they have usually reached, even in constantly cultivated soils, induced me, several years since, to carefully examine the underlying gravels, to determine if the common surface-found stone implements of Indian origin were ever found therein, except in such manner as might easily be explained, as in the case of deep burials by the uprooting of large trees, whereby an implement lying on the surface, or immediately below it, might fall into the gravel beneath, and subsequently become buried several feet in depth; and lastly, by the action of the water, as where a spring, swollen by spring freshets, cuts for itself a new channel, and carrying away a large body of earth, leaves its larger pebbles, and possibly stone implements of late origin, upon the gravel of the new bed of the stream.” But there is little difficulty in separating chance-buried neolithic or modern implements from the genuine palæolithic celts or hatchets abundantly present in the undisturbed gravel beds, from which they have been taken on their first exposure.

Professor Henry C. Lewis, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, states that “at the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly undisturbed. No implement could have come into this gravel except at a time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood, Man, in a rude state, with habits similar to those of the river-drift hunter of Europe, and probably under a climate similar to that of more northern regions, lived upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone implements in the shifting sands and gravel of the bed of that stream.”^[57] To this Dr. Abbott adds: “At just such a locality as Trenton, where the river widens out, traces of man, had he existed during the accumulation of the gravel, would be most likely to occur. This is true not only because there is here the greatest mass of the gravel, and the best opportunities for examining it in section, but the locality would be one most favourable for the existence of man at the time. The higher ground in the immediate vicinity was sufficiently elevated to be free from the encroachments of the ice and water, and the climate, soil, and fauna are all such as to make it possible for man to exist at this time in this locality.”^[58] In 1878 the tusk of a mastodon was found under partially stratified gravel at a depth of fourteen feet; and Dr. Abbott states that, within a few yards of this, palæolithic implements have been gathered, one at the same and three at greater depths. Now that an intelligent interest has been awakened in the subject, numerous labourers are enlisted in its elucidation. To this a coherent unity has been given by the archæologists of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and the curators of the National Museum at Washington. The results of a systematic inquiry by the latter into the localities and numbers of examples of supposed palæolithic works of art already recovered, have disclosed abundant confirmatory evidence. Special attention was invited to the occurrence of surface-finds, as well as to the depth and the geological indications of age in those recovered from excavations or chance exposures under the surface. Of the superficial examples the proof of the occurrence of stone implements of palæolithic types over widely diffused areas, from New England to Texas, is abundant. Much caution is required in the conclusions derived from such implements found exposed, or in superficial deposits, on a continent where weapons and implements of stone are still in frequent use. But after the elimination of all doubtful examples, abundant evidence remains of the presence of man on the American continent in a Palæolithic as well as an early Neolithic age. An interesting résumé of recent evidence is embodied in the “Results of an Inquiry as to the Existence of Man in North America during the Palæolithic Period of the Stone Age,” by Mr. Thomas Wilson of the National Museum at Washington.^[59]

It may still be a question whether the Palæolithic age of the New World is equally remote with that of the eastern hemisphere. The date approximately assigned thus far to the American Palæolithic era is, geologically speaking, recent; and on that very account adapts itself to other favoured assumptions, such as the supposed Eskimo pedigree derived from the race of Europe’s Reindeer period. This chimes in with the old idea of the American antiquary that the Skrælings referred to in the Eric Saga were Eskimo, as is far from improbable, though the assumption rests on no definite evidence. Dr. Abbott accordingly reproduces the statement of Professor Dawkins, in confirmation of the revived belief. “We are without a clue to the ethnology of the river-drift man, who most probably is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the cave-bear; but the discoveries of the last twenty years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-man with the Eskimo.” Such a fanciful hypothesis once accepted as fact, its application to American ethnology is easy; and so Dr. Abbott proceeds to appeal unhesitatingly to evidence sufficient “to warrant the assertion that the palæolithic man on the one hand, and the makers of the argillite spear points on the other, stand in the relationship of ancestor and descendant; and if the latter, as is probable, is in turn the ancestor of the modern Eskimo: then does it not follow that the River-drift and Cave-man of Europe, supposing the relationship of the latter to the Eskimo to be correct, bear the same close relationship to each other as do the American representatives of these earliest of people?”^[60]

Such an appeal to European archæology can scarcely fail to suggest some very striking contrasts thereby involved. As the thoughtful student dwells on all the phenomena of change and geological revolution which he has to encounter in seeking to assign to the man of the European Drift his place in vanished centuries, his mind is lost in amazement at the vista of that long-forgotten past. Yet inadequate as the intermediate steps may appear, there are progressive stages. Amid all the overwhelming sense of the vastness of the period embraced in the changes which he reviews, the mind rests from time to time at well-defined stations, in tracking the way backward, through ages of historical antiquity, into the night of time, and so to that dim dawn of mechanical skill and rational industry in which the first tool-makers plied their ingenious arts. But, so far as yet appears, it is wholly otherwise throughout the whole western continent, from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the pole. North America has indeed a Copper age of its own very markedly defined; for the shores and islands of Lake Superior are rich in pure native copper, available for industrial resources without even the most rudimentary knowledge of metallurgic arts. But the tools and personal ornaments fashioned out of this more workable material are little, if at all, in advance of the implements of stone; and, with this exception, the primitive industry of North America manifests wondrously slight traces of progression through all the ages now assigned to man’s presence on the continent.

The means available for forming some just estimate of the character of native American art are now abundant. In the National Museum at Washington; the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass.; the Peabody Academy at Salem; the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia; the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and in various Historical Societies and University Museums throughout the States; the student of American archæology has the means of obtaining a comprehensive view of the native arts. At the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876, the various States vied with one another in producing an adequate representation of the antiquities specially characteristic of their own localities; and numerous valuable reports, of the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Geographical Surveys, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the Geological Surveys of various States, have furnished data for determining the prehistoric chroniclings of the northern continent.

One of the latest publications of this class is Dr. Abbott’s own volume, entitled Primitive Industry: or Illustrations of the Handiwork in Stone, Bone, and Clay of the native Races of the Northern Atlantic Seaboard of America. It is a most instructive epitome of North American archæology. Notwithstanding the limits set in the title, works in metal as well as in stone are included; and what are the results? Twenty-one out of its twenty-three chapters are devoted to the detailed illustrations of stone and flint axes, celts, hammers, chisels, scrapers, drills, knives, etc. Fish-hooks, fish-spears, awls or bodkins, and other implements of bone, pottery, pipes both in stone and clay, and personal ornaments, receive the like detailed illustration; but nearly all are in the rudest stage of rudimentary art. An advance upon this is seen in the pottery of some southern states. That of the Mound-Builders appears to have shown both more artistic design and better finish. The carving in bone, ivory, and slate-stone of various western tribes, as well as of the extinct Mound-Builders, was also of a higher character. But taking them at their highest, they cannot compare in practical skill or variety of application with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic age; and we look in vain for any traces of higher progress. For well nigh four centuries, this continent has been familiar to European explorers and settlers. During some considerable portion of that time, by means of agricultural operations, and all the incidents consequent on urban settlement, its virgin soil has been turned up over ever-increasing areas. For nearly forty years I have myself watched, with the curious interest of one previously familiar with the minute incidents of archæological research in Britain, the urban excavations, railway cuttings, and other undesigned explorations of Canadian soil. Within the same period, both in Canada and the United States, extensive canal, railway, and road-works have afforded abundant opportunities for research; and a widespread interest in American antiquities has tended to confer an even exaggerated importance on every novel discovery. And with what result? Dr. Abbott, in crowning such explorations with his interesting and valuable discovery of the turtle-back celts and other implements of the Delaware gravel, has epitomised the prehistoric record of the northern continent. The further back we date the presence of man in America, the more marvellous must his unprogressive condition appear. Whatever may be the ampler disclosures relative to the palæolithic or primeval race, it does not seem probable that this northern continent will now yield any antiquities suggestive of an extinct era of native art and civilisation. Here we cannot hope to find a buried Ilium, or Tadmor in the Wilderness. Everywhere the explorer wanders, and the agriculturist follows, turning up the soil, or digging deeper as he drains and builds; but only to disturb the grave of the savage hunter. The Mound-Builders of its great river-valleys have indeed left there their enduring earthworks, wrought at times in regular geometrical configuration on a gigantic scale, strangely suggestive of some overruling and informing mind guiding the hand of the earthworker. But their mounds and earthworks disclose only implements of bone and flint or stone, with here and there an equally rude tool of hammered native copper. The crudest metallurgy of Europe’s Copper age was unknown to their builders. The art of Tubal-cain, the primitive worker in brass and iron, had not dawned on the mind of any native artificer. Only the ingeniously carved tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of even such progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker as is shown in the artistic carvings of the cave-men contemporary with the mammoth and the reindeer of post-glacial France.

The civilisation of Central and Southern America is a wholly distinct thing; and, as I think, not without some suggestive traces of Asiatic origin; but the attempts to connect it with that of ancient Egypt, suggested mainly by the hieroglyphic sculpturing on their columns and temples, find their confutation the moment we attempt to compare the Egyptian calendar with that either of Mexico or Peru. Traces of worship of the sun, the earliest of all forms of natural religion, have undoubtedly been recovered among widely scattered tribes of North America; but there is no evidence that it was accompanied with any definite mensuration of the solar year, or the construction of a calendar. The changes of the seasons sufficed for the division of the year, not only into summer and winter, but into the diverse aspects of the seasons from month to month; as is shown in the names given to the “moons” in various native vocabularies. It was otherwise on the southern continent, and among the civilised nations of Central America. But the interblending of the science of astronomy with the religious rites of the State produced the wonted results; and this was peculiarly the case in Peru, with its equatorial site for the temple of the Sun-God; and his seeming literal presence on his altar at recurrent festivals. There accordingly, even as in ancient Egypt, the divine honours paid to the heavenly bodies was an impediment to the progress of astronomical observation. Eclipses were regarded with the same superstitious dread as among the rudest savage nations; and the conservatism of an established national creed must have proved peculiarly unfavourable to astronomical science. The impediments to Galileo’s observations were trifling compared with those which must have beset the Inca priest who ventured to question the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth, or to solve the awful mystery of an eclipse by so simple an explanation as the interposition of the moon between the sun and the earth. The Mexican Calendar Stone, which embodies evidence of greater knowledge, was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient science of South-Eastern Asia. It is of more importance here to note the shortness of the Mexican cycle, and the small amount of error in their deviation from true solar time, as compared with the European calendar at the time when the Spaniards first intruded on Montezuma’s rule. That the Spaniards were ten days in error, as compared with the Aztec reckoning, only demonstrates the length of time during which error had been accumulating in the reformed Julian calendar of Europe; and so tends to confirm the idea that the civilisation of the Mexicans was of no very great antiquity.

The whole evidence supplied by Northern archæology proves that in so far as it had any civilisation of foreign origin, it must have been derived from the South, where alike in Central and in Southern America, diverse races, and a native civilisation replete with elements of progress, have left behind them many enduring memorials of skill and ingenuity. But the extremely slight and very partial traces of its influence on any people of the northern continent would of itself suffice to awaken doubts as to its long duration. The civilisation of Greece and Rome did indeed exercise no direct influence on transalpine Europe; but long centuries before the Romans crossed the Alps, as the disclosures of the lake villages, the crannoges, the kitchen middens, and the sepulchral mounds of Central and Northern Europe prove, the nations beyond their ken were familiar with weaving, and with the ceramic and metallurgic arts; were far advanced as agriculturists, had domesticated animals, acquired systems of phonetic writing, and learned the value of a currency of the precious metals.

Midway between North America with its unredeemed barbarism, and the southern seats of a native American civilisation, Mexico represents, as I believe, the first contact of the latter with the former. A gleam of light was just beginning to dawn on the horizon of the northern continent. The long night of its Dark Ages was coming to a close, when the intrusion of the Spaniards abruptly arrested the incipient civilisation, and began the displacement of its aborigines and the repetition of the Aryan ethnical revolution, which had already supplanted the autochthones of prehistoric Europe.

The publication in 1848 of the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, devoted to the history and explorations of the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, gave a wonderful stimulus to archæological research in the United States. For a time, indeed, much credulous zeal was devoted to the search for buried cities, inscribed records, and the fancied recovery, in more or less modified form, in northern areas, of the civilisation of the Aztecs; not unmingled with dreams of Phœnician, Hebrew, Scandinavian, and Welsh remains. The history of some of its spurious productions is not without interest; but its true fruits are seen in numerous works which have since issued from the American press, devoted to an accurate record of local antiquities. So thoroughly has this already been carried out, that it may now be affirmed that, to all appearance, the condition of the Indian tribes to the north of Mexico, as shown in the rude arts of a Stone age, scarcely at all affected in its character by their use of the native copper of Lake Superior, represents what prevailed throughout the whole northern continent in all the centuries—however prolonged,—since the hunters in the Delaware valley fashioned and employed their turtle-back celts.

The condition of the nations of North America at the period of its discovery, at the close of the fifteenth century, may be described as one of unstable equilibrium; and nothing in its archæological records points to an older period of any prolonged duration of settled progress. The physical geography of the continent presents in many respects such a contrast to that of Europe, as is seen in the steppes of Northern Asia, though with great navigable rivers, which only needed the appliances of modern civilisation to make them for the New World what the Euphrates and the Tigris were to Southern Asia, and the Nile to Africa, in ancient centuries. Those vast tablelands, the great steppes of Mongolia and Independent Tartary, have ever been the haunts of predatory tribes by whom the civilisation of Southern Asia has been repeatedly overthrown; and from the same barbarian hive came the Huns who ravaged the Roman world in its decline. Europe, on the contrary, nursed its youthful civilisation among detached communities of its southern peninsulas on the Mediterranean Sea; and in later ages has repeatedly experienced the advantages of geographical isolation in the valleys of the Alps, in Norway and Denmark, in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the British Islands: where nations protected in their youth from predatory hordes, and sheltered during critical periods of change, have safely passed through their earlier stages of progress.

All that we know or can surmise of the nations of North America, presents a total contrast to this. In so far as the mystery of its prehistoric Mound-Builders has been solved, we see there a people who had attained to a grade of civilisation not greatly dissimilar to that of the village communities of New Mexico and Arizona; and who had settled down in the Ohio valley, perhaps while feudal Europe was still only emerging from mediæval rudeness, if not at an earlier date. The great river-valley was occupied by populous urban centres of an industrious community. Agriculture, though prosecuted only with the simplest implements, chiefly of wood and stone, must have been practised on an extensive scale. The primitive arts of the potter were improved; the copper abounding in the remote region on the shores of Lake Superior was prized as a rarity; though metallurgy in its practical applications had scarcely entered on its first stage. The nation was in its infancy; but it had passed beyond the rude hunter state, and was entering on a settled life, with all possibilities of progress in the future, when the fierce nomads of the north swept down on the populous valley, and left it a desolate waste. If so, it was but a type of the whole native history of the continent.