two languages being “as closely related as is Spanish to Portuguese.” W. H. Dall (Contributions to American Ethnology, vol. i., Washington, 1877) further points out that the Innuit (Eskimo) tongue, said to be spoken by the Tchuktchis, is merely a trading jargon, a mixture of Koriak, Tchuktchi, Innuit, English, Hawaiian, and others. It is also to be noted that the Samoyedes and other Asiatic Arctic peoples, assumed by many to be the progenitors of the Eskimo, are of Mongoloid stock and distinctly brachycephalous, while the Eskimo are the most dolichocephalous race on the globe next to the Kai Colos of Fiji (Flower). Thus the Eskimo, instead of being a connecting link, form an anthropological barrier between the populations of the two hemispheres at the very point geographically most convenient for effecting the transition.
Nor would the question be much furthered by allowing the arrival of a few barbarous tribes via Behring Strait in prehistoric times. Their presence would leave the Aztec, Mayan, Peruvian, and other local cultures unexplained, except as independent developments. And more recent historic migrations of Chinese, Japanese, and other civilized peoples, otherwise involved in tremendous difficulties, would leave equally unexplained the primeval mound-building races of the Ohio valley and the still more ancient Brazilian races of the Santa Catharina and Santos shell-heaps. Because a stray vessel has been cast ashore on the western seaboard since the discovery of America, Virchow suggests the possibility of similar arrivals in remoter times. But if the Chinese arrived so recently as even 8000 years ago (an extreme supposition) in sufficient numbers to build up a civilization in Central America, the Chinese origin of such a civilization would to this day be as self-evident as is the Chinese origin of the neighbouring Japanese civilization. The foreign founders of these communities would necessarily have brought with them their arts, their domestic animals, their more useful plants and cereals, without which they must have themselves speedily perished or been absorbed in the surrounding native populations. But no trace of these things was found in the New World on its discovery. There was neither the rice of the Chinese, nor the wheat, barley, oats, or rye of the Western nations, nor the iron now proved to have been known to the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, nor the horse, camel, ox, sheep, pig, dog, or poultry of the eastern hemisphere. Instead of these, there was little beyond one cereal (maize), one esculent root (potato), one feeble beast of burden (llama), limited to the uplands of the southern Cordilleras, one species of dog elsewhere unknown. Most of the useful plants and animals of the East have since been introduced, and flourish vigorously even in the wild state, a sufficient proof that they would have been propagated had they been introduced at an earlier epoch. The knowledge of metals was limited to copper, both wrought and, in Wisconsin, apparently cast (J. S. Butler), bronze, lead, gold, and silver. Otherwise most of the nations were at the discovery still in the Stone Age; and, although Virchow's assertion may be true that the most practised archæologist will fail to detect any material difference between the stone implements of the two hemispheres, this merely implies that the arts of Palæolithic and Neolithic man were pretty much the same everywhere.
Nor is there anything in the religions, systems of government, architecture, and other arts of the native Americans, by which they can be connected with the corresponding systems of the East. That the Toltec builders of the low obtruncated Mexican pyramids were a different people from the pyramid builders of the Nile valley, and that the mummies of the Ancon necropolis and other parts of Peru were of a different stock from the Egyptian mummies, is sufficiently evident from the texture of the hair alone. The hair of the old cultured races of America was the same as that of all the later American races, uniformly lank, because cylindrical in section. The hair of the old Egyptians, like that of the modern Fellahîn, is, on the contrary, uniformly wavy, because more or less oval in section. The religions, again, of the Red Man, we are told by Carl Schultz-Sellack, Oscar Loew, and other good observers, are “essentially astrological, based on star, sun, and moon worship,” with which was often associated an intricate method of measuring time built on a series of twenty constellations" (Zeitschr. für Ethnologie, 1879, p. 209). “The sun,” says Loew, “is the god of most Indian tribes. ‘He diffuses warmth and nourishment for us and our animals; why shall we not worship him?’ observed to me on one occasion Masayamtiba, a Moqui Indian (New Mexico)” (ib. p. 265). This Masayamtiba was a better philosopher than those ethnologists who seek for the origin of such a simple cult in the remote corners of the globe, rather than in the beneficial influence of the heavenly bodies which shine alike for all mankind. The four great gods of the Mayas, the “props of the heavens,” answered to the four great Mexican gods of the four quarters of the compass, all being associated with the four elements of wind, water, fire, and earth. But to what does either system answer in the polytheistic creeds of the Hindus, Assyrians, Babylonians, or other nations of antiquity? There is something similar in the Neo-Buddhistic teachings; but Buddhism, even of the oldest type, is much too recent to explain anything in the religious worlds of Mexico or Yucatan. The hare is associated in America, in Asia, and even amongst the Bushmen of South Africa with the moon. But this association was obviously suggested independently by the spots which, especially in the first quarter of the moon seem to present the outlines of a hare on its form. Waitz (Anthropology, p. 255) well observes that a common belief in a universal flood, or in the periodical destruction of the world, whether by fire, water, storms, or earthquakes, and analogous or parallel lines of thought—taken individually—afford no proof whatever in favour of affinity, and even resemblances in several points possess only a secondary importance; for they may partly, under like conditions, arise spontaneously among peoples who have always lived in a state of separation, or may have partly resulted from periods of short intercourse between two different peoples.
In any case, these slight coincidences are of little account when weighed against the argument based on diversity of speech. The tremendous force of this argument, as applied to the American aborigines, is scarcely realized by anthropologists such as Waitz or Virchow, who have not cultivated philological studies, and it is significant that, in the already quoted paper by Virchow on the “Anthropology of America,” the linguistic element is not even referred to. On the other hand, it has been greatly depreciated and even brought into contempt by the vagaries of certain etymologists, who discover affinities where there is nothing but the vaguest verbal resemblance.[1] Science has demonstrated beyond all cavil that, while differing widely among themselves, the American languages not only betray no
- ↑ It may be sufficient to refer to the series of papers by Mr John Campbell of Montreal on the "Hittites in America," which have recently appeared in the Canadian Quarterly Journal of Science, and which on the most fanciful grounds connect the native idioms not only with each other but with most of the known lauguages of the universe. Thus Iroquois and Peruvian are declared to be radically one, while the former is connected with Basque, Dakotan with Circassian, Accad with Japanese, and a general Khita linguistic family is made to include, besides all these, Choctaw, Cherokee, Aleutian, Fuegian, Aino, Kamtchadale, Tchuktchi, Haussa, Barabra, and many others in every part of the world.
