The Indians of the New World, whencesoever they derived their origin, present to us just such a type of unprogressive life as the nomads of the Asiatic steppe. The Red-Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for development, the forests of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean-bed. That he is no recent intruder is indisputably proved alike by physical and intellectual evidence. On any theory of human origin, the blended gradations of America’s widely diversified indigenous races, demand a lengthened period for their development; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hundred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. The known origin and growth of some of these may supply a standard whereby to gauge the time indicated by such a multiplication of tongues. But the languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed twelve hundred and sixty, including agglutinate languages of peculiarly elaborate structure, and inflectional forms of complex development. Of the grammar of the Lenni-Lenapé Indians, Duponceau remarks: “It exhibits a language entirely the work of the children of nature, unaided by our arts and sciences, and, what is most remarkable, ignorant of the art of writing. Its forms are rich, regular, and methodical, closely following the analogy of the ideas which they are intended to express; compounded, but not confused; occasionally elliptical in their mode of expression, but not more so than the languages of Europe, and much less so than those of a large group of nations on the eastern coast of Asia. The terminations of their verbs, expressive of number, person, time, and other modifications of action and passion, while they are richer in their extension than those of the Latin and Greek, which we call emphatically the learned languages, appear to have been formed on a similar but enlarged model, without other aid than that which was afforded by nature operating upon the intellectual faculties of man.”[[3]] At the same time it is no less important to note the limited range of vocabulary in many of the American languages. Those characteristics, taken along with their peculiar holophrastic power of inflecting complex word-sentences, and expressing by their means delicate shades of meaning, exhibit the phenomena of human speech in some of their most remarkable phases. But the range of the vocabularies furnishes a true gauge of the intellectual development of the Indian: incapable of abstract idealism, realising few generic relations, and multiplying words by comparisons and descriptive compounds.

To whatever cause we attribute such phenomena, much is gained by being able to study them apart from the complex derivative elements which trammel the study of European philology. Assuming for our present argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a common typical structure, but literally, as descendants of one stock: in the primitive scattering of infant nations, the Mongol and the American went eastward, while the Indo-European began his still uncompleted wanderings towards the far west. The Mongol and the Indo-European have repeatedly met and mingled. They now share, unequally, the Indian peninsula and the continent of Europe. But the American and the Indo-European only met after an interval measurable by thousands of years, coming from opposite directions, and having made the circuit of the globe.

The Red-Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How old he may be it is impossible to determine; but with one American school of ethnologists, no historical antiquity is sufficient for him. The earliest contributions of the New World to the geological traces of man were little less startling, when first brought to light, than any that the European drift has since revealed. The island of Guadaloupe, one of the lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art imbedded in the solid rock. They seemed to the wondering naturalist to upset all preconceived ideas of the origin of the human race. But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells. The skeletons are probably by no means ancient, even according to the reckoning of American history; though supplying a curious link in the palæontological treasures both of the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, has described human bones, bearing, as he believed, marks of geological antiquity, found along with those of many extinct mammals, in the calcareous caves of Brazil. Fossil human remains have also been recovered from a calcareous conglomerate of the coral reefs of Florida, estimated by Professor Agassiz to be not less than 10,000 years old;[[4]] and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia treasures the os innominatum of a human skeleton, a fragment of disputed antiquity, dug up near Natchez, on the Mississippi, beneath the bones of the megalonyx.[[5]]

From those, and other discoveries of a like kind, this at least becomes apparent, that in the New World, as in the Old, the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology. According to geological reckoning, much of the American continent has but recently emerged from the ocean. Among the organic remains of Canadian post-tertiary deposits are found the Phoca, Balœna, and other existing marine mammals and fishes along with the Elephas primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, and other long-extinct species. Looking on the human skeletons of the Guadaloupe limestone in the Museums of London and Paris,—the first examples of the bones of man in a fossil state,—the gradation in form between him and other animals presents no very important contrast to the uninstructed eye. Modern though those rock-imbedded skeletons are, they accord with older traces of human remains mingling with those of extinct mammals, to which more recent speculations have given so novel an interest in relation to the question of the antiquity of man. The origin and duration of the American type still remain in obscurity. Man entered on the occupation of the New World in centuries which there, as elsewhere, stretch backward as we strive to explore them. His early history is lost, for it is not yet four centuries since its discovery; and he still survives there, as he then did, a being apart from all that specially distinguishes either the cultivated or the uncultured man of Europe. His continent, too, has become the stage whereon are being tested great problems in social science, in politics, and in ethnology. There the civilised man and the savage have been brought face to face to determine anew how far God “giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” There, too, the Black man and the Red, whose destinies seemed to separate them wide as the world’s hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties, of a dominant, a savage, and a servile race. In all ways: in its recoverable past, in its comprehensible present, in its conceivable future, the New World invites our study, with the promise of disclosures replete with interest in their bearing on secrets of the elder world.

[1] Vide Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.
[2] Morton: Crania Americana; Nott: Indigenous Races, etc.
[3] American Philosophical Transactions, N. S. vol. iii. p. 248.
[4] Types of Mankind. P. 352.
[5] Proceed. Acad. Nat. Sc. Philad. Oct. 1846. P. 107.