The color seems also not to depend on local situation, and in the same individual the covered parts are not fairer than those exposed to the heat and moisture. Where the differences are slight, the cause may possibly be found in partial emigrations from other countries. The characteristic brown tint is said to be occasioned by a pigment beneath the lower skin, peculiar to them with the African family, but wanting in the European.
Another division of the American race has been suggested, into three great classes, according to the pursuits on which they depend for subsistence, namely, hunting, fishing, and agriculture. The American race are further said to be intellectually inferior to the Caucasian and Mongolian races. They seem incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects. They seize easily and eagerly on simple truths, but reject those which require analysis or investigation. Their inventive faculties are small, and they generally have but little taste for the arts and sciences. A most remarkable defect is the difficulty they have of comprehending the relations of numbers. Mr. Schoolcraft assured Dr. Morton, that this was the cause of most of the misunderstandings in respect to treaties between the English and the native tribes.
The Toltecan family are considered as embracing all the semi-civilized nations of Mexico, Peru, and Bogota, reaching from the Rio Gila, in 33 degrees of north latitude, along the western shore of the continent, to the frontiers of Chili, and on the eastern coast along the Gulf of Mexico. In South America, however, they chiefly occupied a narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. The Bogotese in New Grenada were, in civilization, between the Peruvians and the Mexicans. The Toltecans were not the sole possessors of these regions, but the dominant race, while the American race composed the mass of the people.
The great difference between the Toltecan and the American races consisted in the intellectual faculties, as shown in their arts and sciences, architectural remains, pyramids, temples, grottos, bass-reliefs, and arabesques; their roads, aqueducts, fortifications, and mining operations.
With respect to the American languages, there is said to exist a remarkable similarity among them. From Cape Horn to the Arctic Sea, all the nations have languages which possess a distinctive character, but still apparently differing from all those of the Old World. This resemblance, too, is said not to be of an indefinite kind. It generally consists in the peculiar modes of conjugating the verbs by inserting syllables. Vater, a distinguished German writer on this subject, says, that this wonderful uniformity favors, in a singular manner, the supposition of a primitive people which formed the common stock of the American indigenous nations. According to M. Balbi, there are more than 438 different languages, embracing upwards of 2,000 dialects. He estimates the Indians of the brown race at 10,000,000, and the races produced by the intermixture of the pure races at 7,000,000.
We have thus given a general classification of the great American family, and the main points respecting the question of their origin. We must confess our inability wholly to lift the veil of obscurity in which their early history is involved, or answer, conclusively, the inquiry, whence they came, or when America was first peopled. We can only offer what we have already stated as the most plausible theory, that, ages ago, a great nation of Asia passed, at different times, by way of Behring’s Straits, into the American Continent, and in the course of centuries spread themselves over its surface. Here we suppose them to have become divided by the slow influences of climate, and other circumstances, into the several varieties which they display.
