When Columbus, approaching the main land of South America, imagined it a large island, he associated it with that belief so long current in the Old World, which placed the cradle of the race in the Indian Ocean,—a belief which in our day has been advocated by Haeckel, Caspari and Winchell,—and imagined he was on the coasts, skirting an interior, where lay the Garden of Eden.[1591] No one had then ventured on the belief that the doctrine of Genesis must be reconciled with any supposed counter-testimony by holding it to be but the record of the Jewish race. Columbus was not long in his grave when Theophrastus Paracelsus, in 1520, and before the belief in the continuity of North America with Asia was dispelled, and consequently before the question of how man and animals could have reached the New World was raised, first broached the heterodox view of the plurality of the human race. All the early disputants on the question of the origin of the American man looked either across the Atlantic or the Pacific for the primitive seed; nor was there any necessary connection between the arguments for an autochthonous American man and a diversity of race, when Fabricius, in 1721, published his Dissertatio Critica[1592] on the opinions of those who held that different races had been created. From that day the old orthodox interpretation of the record in Genesis found no contestant of mark till the question came up in relation to the American man, it being held quite sufficient to account for the inferiority or other distinguishing characteristics of race by assigning them to the influence of climate and physical causes.[1593]
LOUIS AGASSIZ.
After a photograph, hanging in the Somerset Club, Boston; suggested to the editor by Mr. Alexander Agassiz as a satisfactory likeness.
The strongest presentation of the case, in considering the American man a distinct product of the American soil, with no connection with the Old World[1594] except in the case of the Eskimos, was made when S. G. Morton, in 1839, printed his Crania Americana, or a comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America, of which there was a second edition in 1844.[1595] Here was a new test, and applied, very likely, in ignorance of the fact that Governor Pownal, in 1766, in Knox’s New Collection of Voyages, had suggested it.[1596] Dr. Morton had gathered a collection of near a thousand skulls from all parts of the world,[1597] and based his deductions on these,—a process hardly safe, as many of his successors have determined.[1598] The views of Morton respecting the autochthonous origin of the Indian found an able upholder when Louis Agassiz, taking the broader view of the independent creation of higher and inferior races,[1599] gave in his adhesion to the original American man (Christian Examiner, July, 1850, vol. xlix. p. 110). These views got more extensive expression in a publication which appeared in Philadelphia in 1854, in which some unpublished papers of Morton are accompanied by a contribution from Agassiz, and all are grouped together and augmented by material of the editors, Dr. Josiah Clark Nott[1600] of Mobile, and Mr. George R. Gliddon, long a resident in Cairo. The Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches (Philad., 1854, 1859, 1871), met with a divided reception; the conservative theologians called it pretentious and false, and there was some color for their detraction in some rather jejune expositions of the Hebrew Scriptures contained in the book. The physiologists thought it brought new vigor to a question which properly belonged to science.[1601] Other fresh material, with some discussions, made up a new book by the same editors, published three years later, Indigenous Races of the Earth, or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry (Philad. and London, 1857; 2d ed., 1857).[1602]
The theological attacks were not always void of a contempt that ill befitted the work of refutation. The most important of them were John Bachman’s Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race (Charleston, S. C., 1850), with his Notice of the Types of Mankind (Charleston, 1854-55); and Thomas Smyth’s Unity of the Human Race proved by Scripture, Reason and Science (N. Y., 1850).[1603]
SAMUEL FOSTER HAVEN.
After a photograph. A heliotype of a portrait by Custer is in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Ap., 1879. Haven’s Annual Reports, as librarian of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., furnish a good chronological conspectus of the progress of anthropological discovery.
The scientific attack on Morton and Agassiz, and the views they represented, was an active one, and embraced such writers as Wilson, Latham, Pickering, and Quatrefages.[1604] The same collection of skulls which had furnished Morton with his proofs yielded exactly opposite evidence to Dr. J. A. Meigs in his Observations upon the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines (Philad., 1866).[1605] Two of the most celebrated of the evolutionists reject the autochthonous view, for Darwin’s Descent of Man and Haeckel’s Hist. of Creation consider the American man an emigrant from the old world, in whatever way the race may have developed.[1606]