This typical, racial American culture is as far as possible, in spirit and form, from the Mongolian. Compare the rich theology of Mexico or Peru with the barren myths of China. The theory of governments, the method of house-construction, the position of woman, the art of war,[[40]] are all equally diverse, equally un-Mongolian. It is useless to bring up single art-products or devices, such as the calendar, and lay stress on certain similarities. The doctrine of the parallelism of human development explains far more satisfactorily all these coincidences. The sooner that Americanists generally, and especially those in Europe, recognize the absolute autochthony of native American culture, the more valuable will their studies become.
It is no longer in season to quote the opinions of Alexander von Humboldt and his contemporaries on this subject, as I see is done in some recent works. The science of archæology has virtually come into being since they wrote, and we now know that the development of human culture is governed by laws with which they were unacquainted. Civilization sprang up in certain centres in both continents, widely remote from each other; but, as the conditions of its origin were everywhere the same, its early products were much alike.
It is evident from what I have said, that the asserted Mongolian or Mongoloid connection of the American race finds no support either from linguistics or the history of culture. If anywhere, it must be in physical resemblances. In fact, it has been mainly from these that the arguments have been drawn. Let us examine them.
Cuvier, who, as I have said, is responsible for the confusion of the American with the Mongolian race, based his racial scheme on the color of the skin, and included the American within the limits of the yellow race. Cuvier had seen very few pure Mongolians, and perhaps no pure-blooded Americans; otherwise he would not have maintained that the hue of the latter is yellow. Certainly it is not. You may call it reddish, or coppery, or cinnamon, or burnt sugar, but you cannot call it yellow. Some individuals or small tribes may approach the peculiar dusky olive of the Chinaman, but so do some of the European peoples of Aryan descent; and there are not wanting anthropologists who maintain that the Aryans are also Mongoloid. The one position is just as defensible as the other on the ground of color.
Several of the most prominent classifications of mankind are based upon the character of the hair; the three great divisions being, as you know, into the straight, the curly, and the woolly haired varieties. These external features of the hair depend upon the form of the individual hairs as seen in cross-section. The nearer this approaches a circle, the straighter is the hair. It is true that both Mongolians and Americans belong to the straight haired varieties; but of the two, the American has the straighter hair, that whose cross-section comes nearer to a perfect circle. So that by all the rules of terminology and logic, if we are to call either branch a variation from the other, we should say that the Mongol is a variety of the American race, and call it “Americanoid,” instead of vice versa.
The color of the hair of the two races is, moreover, distinctly different. Although superficially both seem black, yet, observed carefully by reflected light, it is seen that the ground-tone of the Mongolian is bluish, while that of the American is reddish.
Of positive cranial characteristics of the red race, I call attention to the interparietal bone (the os Incæ), which is found in its extreme development in the American, in its greatest rarity among the Mongolians; also to the form of the glabella, found most prominent in American crania, least prominent in Altaic or northern Mongoloid crania; and the peculiar American characteristics of the occipital bone, flattened externally, and internally presenting in nearly forty per cent. of cases the “Aymarian depression,” as it has been termed, instead of the internal occipital protuberance.[[41]]
The shape of the skull has been made another ground of race-distinction; and, although we have learned of late years that its value was greatly over-estimated by the earlier craniologists, we have also learned that in the average, and throughout large numbers of peoples, it is a very persistent characteristic, and one potently indicative of descent or relationship. Now, of all the peoples of the world, the Mongols, especially the Turanian branch, are the most brachycephalic; they have the roundest heads; and it is in a high degree noteworthy that precisely the American nation dwelling nearest to these, having undoubted contact with them for unnumbered generations, are long-headed, or dolichocephalic, in a marked degree. I mean the Eskimo, and I cannot but be surprised that such an eminent anthropologist as Virchow,[[42]] in spite of this anatomical fact, and in defiance of the linguistic evidence, should have repeated the assertion that the Eskimo are of Mongolian descent.
Throughout the American continent generally, the natives were not markedly brachycephalic. This was abundantly illustrated more than twenty years ago by the late Prof. James Aitkins Meigs, in his “Observations on the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines.” They certainly, in this respect, show no greater Mongoloid affinities than do their white successors on the soil of the United States.
If color, hair, and crania are thus shown to present such feeble similarities, what is it that has given rise to a notion of the Mongoloid origin of the American Indian? Is it the so-called Mongolian eye, the oblique eye, with a seeming droop at its inner canthus? Yes, a good deal has been made of this by certain writers, especially by travellers who are not anatomists. The distinguished ethnologist Topinard says the Chinese are very often found without it, and I can confirm this opinion by those I have seen in this country. It is, indeed, a slight deformity, affecting the skin of the eyebrow only, and is not at all infrequent in the white race. Surgeons know it under the name epicanthus, and, as with us it is considered a disfigurement, it is usually removed in infancy by a slight operation. In a few American tribes it is rather prevalent, but in most of the pure Indians I have seen, no trace of it was visible. It certainly does not rank as a racial characteristic.[[43]]