Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether the extreme sections of the group in question exhibit greater contrasts in physical appearance than those which the difference of their physical and social conditions would lead us to expect; since the mountain range of the southern Andes, the nomadic extension of the Pampas, and the insular localities of the Chonos Archipelago, and the Tierra del Fuego, account for full as much difference as we find—to say nothing of the difference of latitude between Cape Horn and the Peruvian frontier of Chili, in the way of climate. Add to this the opposition between the vicinity of a semi-civilized kingdom like that of Peru on the north, and the absolute isolation of the Tierra del Fuego on the south, as influences which seriously affect the phænomena of the social and civilizational developments. That the typical features of the so-called copper-coloured Indian of America become lost as we approach Cape Horn, is a fact of more importance than the height or size of individual families. The Fuegian is Eskimo in appearance, and the Patagonian approaches the Fuegian.
In Chili we find special notice of a preeminently light-haired and blue-eyed population—the Boroanos.[160]
Fig. 14.
Having now reached the Ultima Thule of the New World we may look back and ask how far the general phænomena and problems connected with the ethnology of South, resemble those of North America: they do so in many respects. There are the same physical divisions of elevated table-land, of open pasture, of steppe, and of forest; the same low levels along similar large rivers, and the same swamps on the sea-shore. And so it is with the distribution of tribes and races. Large areas, like those of the Algonkins and Iroquois, are conterminous with groups of unfixed and almost isolated languages: so that what we have found in Mexico, as opposed to Canada, we shall find in Central South America, as opposed to Brazil and Peru.
Still there are important points of difference. South America, like Africa, lies not only between the tropics, but under the equator. Like Africa, too, only farther than Africa, it extends towards the Antarctic Circle; so that hence we may call the natives of Tierra del Fuego either the Eskimos of the south, or the Hottentots of the west.
In respect to the abundance and value of its ethnological materials, South America, especially for its interior, is one of the dark spots of the world—it is better known than Central Africa, and better known than New Guinea: and saying this we have said all.
And here it may be well to indicate an ethnological method. In Tierra del Fuego we have one of the six extreme points of population; i.e. points from which no population has been supposed to have been determined elsewhere; Easter Island, Van Dieman's Land, the Cape of Good Hope, Lapland, and Ireland, being the other five. In working the problem as to the original centre of population—the birthplace of the human kind—it is these six points with which we should begin, and so seek their point of convergence. This is of two kinds, geographical and philological. The first is that part of the earth's surface where the distance from each is equal (or where it nearest approaches equality); the second, the locality of that language which has, at one and the same time, the greatest likeness to the Teapi,[161] the Tasmanian, the Fuegian, the Hottentot, the Lapponic, and the Gaelic. Of course such centres would be conventional, and liable to the influence of disturbing causes. Still they involve a principle that is both safe and scientific; and, if the land were one vast circular island, in the midst of the ocean, and the changes that affect language had taken place at a uniform rate throughout the domain of speech, such a state of things would supply a conventional ethnological centre.
Such a conventional centre would be the mean point between the geographical and the philological ones.