SIR DANIEL WILSON, LL. D., F.R.S.E.
From a photograph kindly furnished, on request, by Professor Wilson’s family.
Of the leading historians of the early American peoples, Prescott, dealing with the Mexicans, is inclined to agree with Humboldt’s arguments as to their primitive connection with Asia.[1607] Geo. Bancroft, in the third volume of his Hist. of the United States (1840), surveying the field, found little in the linguistic affinities, little in what Humboldt gathered from the Mexican calendars and from other developments, nothing from the Western mounds, which he was sure were natural earth-knobs and water-worn passages,[1608] and decides upon some transmission by the Pacific route from Asia, but so remote as to make the American tribes practically indigenous, so far as their character is concerned.
In 1843 another compiler of existing evidence appeared in Alexander W. Bradford in his American Antiquities, or Researches into the origin and history of the Red Race. His views were new. He connects the higher organized life of middle America with the corresponding culture of Southern Asia, the Polynesian islands probably furnishing the avenue of migrations; while the ruder and more northern peoples of both shores of the Pacific represent the same stock degraded by northern migrations.
In 1845 the American Ethnological Society began its publications, and in Albert Gallatin it had a vigorous helper in unravelling some of these mysteries. A few years later (1853) the United States government lent its patronage and prestige to the huge conglomerate publication of Schoolcraft, his Indian Tribes of the United States, which leaves the bewildered reader in a puzzling maze,—the inevitable result of a work undertaken beyond the ambitious powers of an untrained mind. The work is not without value if the user of it has more systematic knowledge than its compiler, to select, discard, and arrange, and if he can weigh the importance of the separate papers.[1609]
In 1856 Samuel F. Haven, the librarian and guiding spirit of the American Antiquarian Society, summed up, as it had never been done before, for comprehensiveness, and with a striking prescience, the progress and results of studies in this field, in his Archæology of the United States (Smithsonian Contributions, viii., Washington, 1856).
EDWARD B. TYLOR.