and parcel of the surrounding animal creation; a point in correspondence with an idea previously entertained that the Mongolian has peculiar qualifications for reclaiming, or reducing animals to the domestic state." But all was strange, wild, and savage. The broad continent lay between those Pacific coasts and the seats of civilisation on its eastern shores; and standing in the midst of a temporary Indian encampment, and surrounded by all the rude details of savage life, he exclaims: "Scarcely two centuries ago, our New England shores presented only scenes like that before me; and what is to be the result of the lapse of the third?" Twenty years have elapsed since then. The town of Victoria is rising on Vancouver's Island, and that of New Westminster, in British Columbia. And the British Colonist, the New Westminster Times, and other broadsheets of the North Pacific coast already tell of the printing-press in full operation, where so recently the Indian trail and the rude wigwam of the savage were the sole evidences of the presence of man. The mineral wealth of Fraser's River has attracted thousands to the new province. The clearing, the farm, and the industrious settlement, have displaced the ephemeral lodges of the Indian; and are rapidly superseding the no less ephemeral shanties of the gold diggings. The Customs' receipts of the colony of British Columbia for the year 1860 exceeded £32,000; and the proceeds are being chiefly expended on public works. The progress of a single year outspeeds the work of past centuries. Amid the charred stumps and the rough clearings of the young settlement, fancy traces, not obscurely, the foundations of future states and empires, and the ports of the merchant navies of the Pacific that shall unite America to Asia, as America has been united to Europe. Already the indomitable enterprise of the intruding races

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has planned the route of overland travel, and even now the railways are stretching westward towards the Rocky Mountains. Explorers are surveying their defiles for the fittest passage, through which to guide the snorting steam-horse, and all the wonderful appliances by which the triumphs of modern civilisation are achieved. If such victories were only to be obtained, like those of the first Spanish colonists of the New World, by the merciless extermination of the Indian occupants of the soil, it would be vain to hope for the endurance of states or empires thus founded in iniquity; but if, by the intrusion of the vigorous races of Europe, smiling farms and busy marts are to take the place of the tangled trail of the hunter and the wigwam of the savage; and the millions of a populous continent, with the arts and letters, the matured policy, and the ennobling impulses of free states, are to replace the few thousands of the scattered tribes living on in aimless, unprogressive strife: even the most sensitive philanthropist may learn to look with resignation, if not with complacency, on the peaceful absorption and extinction of races who accomplish so imperfectly every object of man's being. If the survivors can be protected against personal wrong; and, so far as wise policy and a generous statesmanship can accomplish it, the Indian be admitted to an equal share with the intruding colonizer, in all the advantages of progressive civilisation: then we may look with satisfaction on the close of that long night of the Western World, in which it has given birth to no science, no philosophy, no moral teaching that has endured; and hail the dawn of centuries in which the states and empires of the West are to claim their place in the world's commonwealth of nations, and bear their part in the accelerated progress of the human race.

CHAPTER XXV.

ETHNOGRAPHIC HYPOTHESES: MIGRATIONS.

Our

THE ethnology of the New World is unquestionably simpler than that of Europe or Asia, in its freedom from complicated elements which retard our study of the latter alike in their ancient and modern aspects. Nevertheless, this may be more apparent than real. knowledge of history prevents our under-estimating Pelasgian or Etruscan, Basque, Magyar, or Celtic elements of diversity. Ignorance may be the cause of our overlooking or under-estimating diversities among American languages as great as the German and Euskara, or the Sanscrit and the Chinese. America, indeed, appears to have its monosyllabic Otomi and Mazahui, with their analogies to the Chinese, and their seemingly radical contrast to that polysynthetic structure which appears to be as predominant throughout the New World as Indo-European affinities are characteristic of the languages of Europe. But we scarcely know yet how justly to estimate the amount of difference; for Mr. Schoolcraft affirms, as a conclusion to which his intimate familiarity with the Algonquin dialects had led him, that they betray evidence of having been built up from monosyllabic roots. If this be indeed demonstrable in any other than the vague sense in which it may be stated of every tongue, the same conclusion will apply to other American languages. Nearly all the Chippewa root

words, he observes, are of one or two syllables; and Gallatin has shown that the same may be affirmed to a great extent of the Mexican, if the pronominal adjuncts and the constantly recurring terminations are detached from the radix. But the polysyllabic characteristics. of the Algonquin exceed even those of the Esquimaux. Holophrasms are common in all its dialects, compounded of a number of articulations, each of which is one of the syllables of a distinct word; and the whole undergoes grammatical changes as a verbal unit. This, therefore, is a condition widely diverse from that of the monosyllabic languages, even where, as in the Otomi, many compounded words occur in the vocabulary. But after making every allowance for unknown nations and tongues, and misinterpreted or unappreciated elements of difference among the varieties of man in the New World, the range of variation appears to extend over a smaller scale than that of Europe or Asia, or even of Africa; while he is everywhere found there under much less diversified modifications of civilized or savage life than on the old historic continents. The original centres of population may have been manifold; for the evidence of the lengthened period of man's presence in America furnishes abundant time for such operations of climatic influences, direct or indirect intercourse, or even positive intermixture, to break down strongly-marked elements of ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, after carefully weighing the various kinds of evidence which have been glanced at in previous chapters, they all seem to resolve themselves into three great centres of propagation, of which the oldest and most influential belongs to the southern and not to the northern continent. The routes originally pursued in such immigrations may have been various, and it is far from impossible that both southern and northern immigrants entered the con

tinent by the same access. Such, however, is not the conclusion to which the previous investigations appear to me to point. If we adopt the most favoured theory, that the New World has been entirely peopled from Asia, through Behring Straits, then the Patagonian should be among the oldest, and the Esquimaux the most recent of its immigrant occupants. But that which seems theoretically the easiest is by no means necessarily the most probable course of migration; and many slight indications combine to suggest the hypothesis of a peopling of South America from Asia, through the islands of the Pacific.

The tendency of philological inquiry, as directed to the peculiar grammatical structure and extreme glossarial diversities of the American languages, was at first to isolate them entirely, and to exaggerate their special phenomena into widely prevalent linguistic features, common to the New World and utterly unknown elsewhere. In this the philologist only pursued the same course as the physiologist, the attention of each being naturally attracted chiefly by what was dissimilar to all that had been observed elsewhere. But as physiological investigations have extended, their disclosures prove less conclusive in the support they yield to the favourite theory of an essential isolation and ethnic diversity for the American man. Increasing knowledge of his languages tends rather to diminish the proofs of that radical difference from all other forms of human speech which was at first too hastily assumed. The synthetic element of structure, though very remarkable in the extent of its development, has many analogies in ancient languages, and is embraced in the grammatical process of all inflectional tongues. But beyond this, important elements of relationship appear to be traceable between languages of America and those of the Polynesian family.