CENTRAL AMERICA.

Architecture.

Fictile Art.

Portrait Sculpture.

Hieroglyphics.

Numerals.

Letters.

To the characteristics thus distributed among the more civilized nations of the New World, have to be added that strange custom of cranial deformation, ancient Asiatic as well as American, and not unknown to the islanders of the Pacific. It is common to nations north and south of the Isthmus of Panama, yet seemingly more truly indigenous to the southern than the northern continent; and it is fully more probable that it was derived by the Asiatic macrocephali, than originally contributed from their Eastern steppes to the prairies and forests of what we style the New World.

The idea which seems best to harmonize with the varied though still imperfect evidence thus glanced at, when viewed in connexion with a supposed Asiatic cradle-land, conceives the earliest current of population destined for the New World to have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and to have reached the South American continent long before an excess of Asiatic population had diffused itself into its own inhospitable northern steppes; that by an Atlantic oceanic migration, another wave of population passed by the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, to the Antilles, Central America, and probably by the Cape Verdes, or, guided by the more southern equatorial current, to Brazil; and that, latest of all, the Behring Straits and the North Pacific Islands may have become the highway for a northern migration by which certain striking diversities of nations

of the verbert connment, including the conquerors of the Maxona platea are most easily accounted for. But of tus basa especially, the evidence is chiefly inferential; and the more obvious traces rather indicate the same cuzwar wild set fra Southern Asia to the Pacific shores of South America, moving onward till it overdowed by Behang Straits and the Aleutian Islands, into the womment fem whence it was originally derived.

But such are only guesses at truth, suggestive it may be of definite views, and permissible in gathering up the last saray Buks of such accumulated, though still very imperfect evidence ; but not to be confounded with its more obvious teachings.

CHAPTER XXVI.

GUESSES AT THE AGE OF MAN.

In previous chapters are embodied the impressions produced by personal observation and direct intercourse with a people in the primitive condition of the Red Indians of the American forests, after years devoted to the study of the traces of an aboriginal population in the British Islands. So much that is natural to the habits and simple arts of savage life, as seen among the Indians of the New World, has presented itself to my eye and mind as the realization in a living present of what I had already conceived of amid the relics of Britain's allophylian tribes, that I am led to believe such archæological researches may be found to have constituted a useful preparative for the study of American ethnology, and the solution of some of the deeply interesting problems which are suggested by the phenomena it discloses; nor can I now doubt that the observation of man in such primitive stages of social development furnishes important aid towards the true interpretation of some of the first traces of human history which so curiously underlie the later records of his presence in Europe. The prehistoric glimpses recorded in previous chapters refer, accordingly, fully as much to the Old World as the New. The latter has furnished not only a novel field of study, but an entirely new point of view, even for those researches into the history of the primeval man of Britain

and Europe, which had already been minutely pursued. Some old views have been modified, while others are confirmed and rendered even more clear. But confined as my former researches were to an area so limited, and dealing with results which claimed some of their peculiar interest from the very insulation of the microcosm within which they were embraced: I feel the more at liberty, when attempting to deal with similar traces pertaining to a continent, to range even beyond its confines, and to follow out the seductive leadings of the younger science into some questions affecting the whole compass of ethnology.

In thus reviewing the evidence elicited by the disclosures of American archæology and ethnology, I have pursued the previously recorded researches with no favourite theory to maintain, but have anxiously striven to arrive at an impartial decision as to what are the legitimate deductions from the evidence. The determination of the relations which the man of America bears to the European or Asiatic man is felt to involve such important results, that this very fact has helped to impede the progress of truth. The assailant has, perhaps, felt emboldened at times by the very gravity of the issues imperilled by his attack; while the adherents to a faith in the all-comprehensive brotherhood of man, have rather entrenched themselves in their own strongholds than fairly met their opponents on the open field of scientific inquiry, Scientific truths, whatever be the interests they involve, can only be determined on scientific grounds; and on such only has any attempt been made to base them in this work. But if an inquiry thus honestly and impartially pursued-like a problem wrought out by algebraical notation,-brings out a result precisely corresponding to conclusions already determined by wholly independent proof, it cannot be unac

ceptable even to those who stand in no need of its confirmation. Such has been my experience in the present inquiry. The subject presented itself in novel aspects the results, whatever they should prove to be, were welcome, since I had no preconceived theory at stake; but, as the subject has expanded before me, I have more and more been convinced how needless a thing it is to supplant ancient belief, from too ready a yielding to the seductive temptations of novel and seemingly simple hypotheses, which commend themselves to the judgment by their apparent solution of difficulties. It is little more than three and a half centuries since the men of the Old and the New World met face to face. For unknown ages before that America had been a world within herself, with nations, languages, arts, and civilisation all her own; and the whole tendency of that later American science, which also claims to be native, though the product of a race of European descent, has been to make of the red man a distinct race and species. I have approached the inquiry pursued in the previous chapters with an earnest desire to avoid prejudging this question, or testing it on other than purely scientific evidence. But the result has been to satisfy me that there is no ground for separating the American from the Asiatic man; but that, on the contrary, greater difficulties exist in reconciling our belief in the descent of all men from a common stock, when we proceed to compare some of the diverse tribes and nations of the Asiatic continent, than any that interfere with our acceptance of the dogma that the Mongols of Asia and America are one.

In the ingenious speculations on the origin of species by which Charles Darwin has startled the scientific world, he remarks, as he draws his first abstract to a close: "The whole history of the world, as at present