Richardson, 1852:[271] "The origin of the Eskimos has been much discussed as being the pivot on which the inquiry into the original peopling of America has been made to turn. The question has been fairly and ably stated by Doctor Latham in his recent work On the Varieties of Man, to which I must refer the reader; and I shall merely remark that the Eskimos differ more in physical aspect from their nearest neighbors than the red races do from one another. The lineaments have a decided resemblance to the Tartar or Chinese countenance. On the other hand, their language is admitted by philologists to be similar to the other North American tongues in its grammatical structure; so that, as Doctor Latham has forcibly stated, the dissociation of the Eskimos from their neighboring nations on account of their physical dissimilarity is met by an argument for their mutual affinity, deduced from philological coincidences."
Meigs, 1857:[272] "A connected series of facts and arguments which seem to indicate that the Eskimo are an exceedingly ancient people, whose dawn was probably ushered in by a temperate climate, but whose dissolution now approaches, amidst eternal ice and snow; that the early migrations of these people have been from the north southwards, from the islands of the Polar Sea to the continent and not from the mainland to the islands; and that the present geographical area of the Eskimo may be regarded as a primary center of human distribution for the entire polar zone."
Abbott, 1876:[273] "It is fair to presume that the first human beings that dwelt along the shores of the Delaware were really the same people as the present inhabitants of Arctic America."
Grote, 1875:[274] Basing himself on certain biological reasonings, the author concludes "that the Eskimos are the existing representatives of the man of the American glacial epoch, just as the White Mountain butterfly (Oeneis semidea) is the living representative of a colony of the genus planted on the retiring of the ice from the valley of the White Mountains."
In a later communication[275] the author expresses the opinion that the peopling of America "was effected during the Tertiary; that the ice modified races of Pliocene man, existing in the north of Asia and America, forced them southward, and then drew them back to the locality where they had undergone their original modification. * * *
"During the process, then, which resulted in the race modification of the Eskimos, their original numbers must have been decreased by the slowly but ever increasing cold of the northern regions, until experience and physical adaptation combined brought them to a state of comparative stability as a race."