If we accept the theory that man as a species spread from one primal centre, and in the higher plasticity of his early life separated into well defined races, which became unalterably fixed not much later than the close of the glacial epoch—and this theory appears to be that now most agreeable to anthropologists—then the earliest Americans made their advent on this continent as immigrants. This is our first fact in their pre-historic chronology; but before we can assign it an accurate position on the scale of geologic time, we must await more complete discoveries than we now have at our command.
We must also wait until our friends the geologists have come to some better understanding among themselves as to what took place in the pleistocene age. You have heard me talking freely about the glacial epoch and its extension in America; but geologists are by no means of one mind as to this extension, and a respectable minority of them, led by Sir J. William Dawson, deny the existence or even possibility of any continental glacier. What others point out as a terminal moraine they explain to be “nothing but the southern limit of the ice-drift of a period of submergence.”[[30]]
It is clear that when we speak about the migration of the Americans at a time when the polar half of each continent was either covered with a glacier thousands of feet thick, or submerged to that depth beneath an arctic sea, we have to do with geographical conditions totally unlike those of to-day. I call attention to this obvious fact because it has not been obvious to all writers.
In your archæological reading you will rarely come across a prettier piece of theoretical history than Mr. Lewis A. Morgan’s description of the gradual peopling of the two Americas by tracing the lines of easiest subsistence. He begins at the fishy rivers of the northwest coast, and follows the original colony which he assumes landed at that point, all the way to Patagonia and Florida.[[31]] But how baseless becomes this vision when we consider the geography of America as it is shown by geology to have been at a period contemporary with the earliest remains of man! We know to a certainty that the human race had already spread far and wide over both its continental areas before Mr. Morgan’s lines of easiest nutrition had come into existence.
Properly employed, a study of those geologic features of a country which determine its geography will prove of vast advantage in ascertaining the events of pre-historic time. These features undoubtedly fixed the lines of migration and of early commerce. Man in his wanderings has always been guided by the course of rivers, the trend of mountain chains, the direction of ocean currents, the position of deserts, passes and swamps. The railroad of to-day follows the trail of the primitive man, and the rivers have ever been the natural highways of nations. The theories of Morgan therefore remain true as theories; only in their application he fell into an error which was natural enough to the science of twenty years ago. Perhaps when twenty years more shall have elapsed, the post-tertiary geology of our continent will have been so clearly defined that the geography of its different epochs will be known sufficiently to trace these lines of migration at the various epochs of man’s residence in the western world, from his first arrival.
I have now set before you, in a superficial manner it is true, the various sources from which we may derive aid in establishing the pre-historic chronology of America. I have also endeavored, to a limited extent, to express myself as to the relative value of these sources. None of them can be neglected, and it will be only from an exhaustive study of them all that we can expect to solve the numerous knotty problems, and lift the veil which hangs so darkly on all that concerns the existence of the American race before the sixteenth century.
We are merely beginning the enormous labor which is before us; we have yet to discover the methods by which we can analyze fruitfully the facts we already know. But I look forward with the utmost confidence to a rich return from such investigations. The day is coming, and that rapidly, when the pre-historic life of man in both the New and the Old World will be revealed to us in a thousand unexpected details. We have but to turn backward about thirty years to reach a time when the science of pre-historic archæology was unknown, and its early gropings were jeered at as absurdities. Already it has established for itself a position in the first rank of the sciences which have to do with the highest of problems. It has cast a light upon the pathway of the human race from the time that man first deserved his name down to the commencement of recorded history. Its conquests are but beginning. Year by year masses of new facts are brought to knowledge from unexpected quarters, current errors are corrected, and novel methods of exploration devised.
As Americans by adoption, it should be our first interest and duty to study the Americans by race, in both their present and past development. The task is long and the opportunity is fleeting. A century more, and the anthropologist will scarcely find a native of pure blood; the tribes and languages of to-day will have been extinguished or corrupted. Nor will the archæologist be in better case. Every day the progress of civilization, ruthless of the monuments of barbarism, is destroying the feeble vestiges of the ancient race; mounds are levelled, embankments disappear, the stones of temples are built into factories, the holy places desecrated. We have assembled here to aid in recovering something from this wreck of a race and its monuments: let me urge upon you all the need of prompt action and earnest work, inasmuch as the opportunities we enjoy will never again present themselves in such fulness.
ON PALÆOLITHS, AMERICAN AND OTHER.[[32]]
There has been much talk in scientific circles lately about Palæoliths, and much misunderstanding about them. Let me try to explain in a few words what they are, what they tell, and what mistakes people make about them.