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THE INFLUENCE OF THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA—THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW—AMERICAN PHASES OF LIFE—THE TERM PREHISTORIC—INFLUENCE OF MIGRATIONS—WHAT IS CIVILISATION?—DOMESTICATION—INDIAN PHILOSOPHY—ABORIGINES—THE TARTAR—THE ARAB—LANGUAGES OF AMERICA—WANDERINGS OF THE NATIONS—FOSSIL MAN—OCCUPATION OF THE NEW WORLD.

The recent development of archæology as a science is due in no slight degree to the simplicity which characterises the prehistoric disclosures of Scandinavia, Ireland, and other regions of Europe lying beyond the range of Greek and Roman influence. But the same element presents itself on a far more comprehensive scale alike in the archæology and the ethnology of the western hemisphere. America may be assumed with little hesitation to have begun its human period subsequent to that of the old world, and to have started later in the race of civilisation. At any rate it admits of no question that its most civilised nations had made a very partial advancement when, in the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact with the matured civilisation of Europe. Hence the earlier stages of human progress can be tested there freed from many obscuring elements inevitable from the intermingling of essentially diverse phases of civilisation on old historic areas. In the days of Herodotus, Transalpine Europe was a greater mystery to the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean than Central Africa is to us. To the Romans of four centuries later, Britain was still almost another world; and the great northern hive from whence the spoilers of the dismembered empire of the Cæsars were speedily to emerge, was so entirely unknown to them, that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, “The Roman colonies along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our eyes a world of which we know nothing.” Nevertheless, the civilisation of the historic centres around the Mediterranean was not without some influence on the germs of modern nations then nursing the hardihood of a vigorous infancy beyond the Danube and the Baltic. The shores of the Atlantic and German oceans, and the islands of the British seas, had long before yielded tribute to the Phœnician mariner; and as the archæologist and the ethnologist pursue their researches, and restore to light memorials of Europe’s early youth, they are startled with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and rites, no less than by the recovered traces of an unfamiliar past.

But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought, into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt; and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities with the mythology and astronomical science of the ancient East; but the western continent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered centuries by ocean barriers from all the influences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European explorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmographer to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia.

Such, then, is a continent where man may be studied under circumstances which seem to furnish the best guarantee of his independent development. No reflex light of Grecian or Roman civilisation has guided him on his way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to medieval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity and culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded; and however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemisphere by its own American nations may have been, man is still seen there in a condition which seems to reproduce some of the most familiar phases ascribed to the infancy of the unhistoric world. The records of its childhood are not obscured, as in Europe, by later chroniclings; where, in every attempt to decipher the traces of an earlier history, we have to spell out a nearly obliterated palimpsest. Amid the simplicity of its palæography, the aphorism, by which alone the Roman could claim to be among the world’s ancient races acquires a new force: “antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.”

The discovery of America was itself one of the great events in the most memorable era of the world’s progress. It wrought a marvellous change in the ideas and opinions of mankind relative to the planet they occupy, and prepared the way for many subsequent revolutions in thought, as well as in action. The world as the arena of human history was thenceforth divided into the Old and the New. In the one hemisphere tradition and myth reach backward towards a dawn of undefined antiquity; in the other, history has a definite and altogether modern beginning. Nevertheless no great research is needed to show that it also has been the theatre of human life, and of many revolutions of nations, through centuries reaching back towards an antiquity as vague as that which lies behind Europe’s historic dawn; and the study alike of the prehistoric and the unhistoric races of America is replete with promise of novel truths in reference to primeval man. Some of the oldest problems in relation to him find their solution there; and, amid the novel inquiries which now perplex the student of science, answers of unexpected value are rendered from the same source.

The study of man’s condition and progress in Europe’s prehistoric centuries reveals him as a savage hunter, armed solely with weapons of flint and bone, frequenting the lake and river margins of a continent clothed in primeval forests and haunted by enormous beasts of prey. Displaced by intrusive migrations, this rude pioneer disappears, and his traces are overlaid or erased by the improved arts of his supplanters. The infancy of the historic nations begins. Metallurgy, architecture, science, and letters follow, effacing the faint records of Europe’s nomadic pioneers; and the first traces of late intruders acquire so primitive an aspect, that the existence of older European nations than the Celtæ seemed till recently too extravagant an idea for serious consideration.

After devoting considerable research to the recovery of the traces of early arts in Britain, and realising from many primitive disclosures some clear conception of the barbarian of Europe’s prehistoric dawn, it has been my fortune to become a settler on the American continent, in the midst of scenes where the primeval forests and their savage occupants are in process of displacement by the arts and races of civilised Europe. Peculiarly favourable opportunities have helped to facilitate the study of this phase of the New World, thus seen in one of its great transitional eras: with its native tribes, and its European and African colonists in various stages of mutation, consequent on migration, intermixture, or collision. In observing the novel aspects of life resulting from such a condition of things, I have been impressed with the conviction that many of the ethnological phenomena of Europe’s prehistoric centuries are here reproduced on the grandest scale. Man is seen subject to influences similar to those which have affected him in all great migrations and collisions of diverse races. Here also is the savage in direct contact with civilisation, and exposed to the same causes by means of which the wild fauna disappear. Some difficult problems of ethnology have been simplified to my own mind; and opinions relative to Europe’s prehistoric races, based on inference or induction, have received striking confirmation. Encouraged by this experience, I venture to set forth the results of an inquiry into the essential characteristics of man, based chiefly on a comparison of the theoretical ethnology of primitive Europe, with such disclosures of the New World.

Man may be assumed to be prehistoric wherever his chroniclings of himself are undesigned, and his history is wholly recoverable by induction. The term has, strictly speaking, no chronological significance; but, in its relative application, corresponds to other archæological, in contradistinction to geological, periods. There are modern as well as ancient prehistoric races; and both are available for solving the problem of man’s true natural condition. But also the relation of man to external nature as the occupant of specific geographical areas, and subject to certain influences of climate, food, material appliances and conditions of life, involves conclusions of growing importance, in view of many novel questions to which the enlarged inquiry as to his true place in nature has given rise. If races of men are indigenous to specific areas, and controlled by the same laws which seem to regulate the geographical distribution of the animal kingdom, the results of their infringement of such laws have been subjected to the most comprehensive tests since the discovery of America. The horse transported to the New World roams in magnificent herds over the boundless pampas; and the hog, restored to a state of nature, has exchanged the degradation of the stye for the fierce courage of the wild boar. There also the indigenous man of the prairie and the forest can still be seen unaffected by native or intruded civilisation; while the most civilised races of Europe have been brought into contact with the African savage; and both have been subjected to all the novel influences in which the western continent contrasts no less strikingly with the temperate than with the tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere. The resultant changes have been great, and the scale on which they have been wrought out is so ample as to stamp whatever conclusions can be legitimately deduced from them with the highest interest and value.

The consequences following from changes of area and climate play a remarkable part in the history of man, and have no analogies in the migrations of the lower animals. The Frank, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman; the Hungarian, the Saracen, and the Turk: are all to a great extent products of the transplanting of seemingly indigenous races to more favouring localities; but the change to all of them was less than that to which the colonists of the New World have been subjected. There the old process was reversed; and the offspring of Europe’s highest civilisation, abruptly transferred to the virgin forest and steppes of the American wilderness, was left amid the widening inheritance of new clearings to develop whatever tendencies lay dormant in the artificial European man.

Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student:—the Red-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal, and still in what it is customary to call a state of nature; the Negro, with many African attributes uneffaced, systematically precluded until very recent years from the free reception of the civilisation with which he has been brought in contact, but subjected nevertheless to novel influences of climate, food, and all external appliances; the White-Man also undergoing the transforming effects of climate, amid novel social and political institutions; and all three extreme types of variety or race testing, on a sufficiently comprehensive scale, their capacity for a fertile intermingling of blood. The period, moreover, is in some respects favourable for summing up results, as changes are at work which mark the close of a cycle in the novel conditions to which one at least of the intruded races has been subjected for upwards of three centuries.

In Europe we study man only as he has been moulded by a thousand external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give form to its modern social life. The faith and morals nurtured among the hills of Judah, the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military prowess of Rome, and the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of medieval Christendom, have all helped to make of us what we are: till in the European of the nineteenth century it becomes a curious question how much pertains to the man, and how much to that civilisation, of which he is in part the author and in part the offspring? In vain we strive to detach European man from elements foreign to him, that we may look on him as he is or was by nature; for he only exists for us as the product of all those multifarious elements which have accumulated along the track of countless generations. The very serf of the Russian steppes cannot grow freely, as his nomad brother of Asia does; but must don the unfamiliar fashions of the Frank, as strange to him as the armour of Saul upon the youthful Ephrathite.

Is, then, civilisation natural to man; or is it only a habit or condition artificially superinduced, and as foreign to his nature as the bit and bridle to the horse, or the truck-cart to the wild ass of the desert? Such questions involve the whole ethnological problem reopened by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man? What are his antecedents? What—within the compass with which alone science deals,—are his future destinies? Does civilisation move only through limited cycles, repeating in new centuries the work of the old; attaining, under some varying phase, to the same maximum of our imperfect humanity, and then, like the wandering comet, returning from the splendour of its perihelion back to night?

Perhaps a question preliminary even to this is: What is civilisation? He who has seen the Euromerican and the Indian side by side can be at no loss as to the difference between civilised and uncivilised man. But is he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly distinguishes the White-from the Red-man of the New World is an attribute peculiar to the former, rather than the development of innate powers common to both, and in the possession of which man differs from all other animals? Domestication is, for the lower animals, the subjection of them to artificial conditions foreign to their nature, which they could not originate for themselves, and which they neither mature nor perpetuate: but, on the contrary, hasten to throw off so soon as left to their own uncontrolled action. Civilisation is for man development. It is self-originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both postulates the social life alike of the forest and of the clearings of the New World seems to offer proofs; and to other questions involved in an inquiry into the origin of civilisation and man’s relations to it, answers may also be recovered from the same source. There the latest developments of human progress are abruptly brought face to face with the most unprogressive phases of savage nature; and many old problems are being solved anew under novel conditions. The race to which this is chiefly due had been isolated during centuries of preparatory training, and illustrates in some of the sources of its progress the impediments to the civilisation of savage races brought in contact with others at so dissimilar a stage. The very elements for Britain’s greatness seem to lie in her slow maturity; in her collision with successive races only a little in advance of herself; in her transition through all the stages from infancy to vigorous manhood. But that done, the Old Englander becomes the New Englander; starts from his matured vantage-ground on a fresh career, and displaces the American Red-man by the American White-Man, the free product of the great past and the great present.

It was with a strange and fascinating pleasure, that, after having striven to resuscitate the races of Britain’s prehistoric ages, by means of their buried arts,^[1] I found myself face to face with the aborigines of the New World. Much that had become familiar to me in fancy, as pertaining to a long obliterated past, was here the living present; while around me, in every stage of transition, lay the phases of savage and civilised life: the nature of the forest, the art of the city; the God-made country, the man-made town: each in the very process of change, extinction, and re-creation. Here, then, was a new field for the study of civilisation and all that it involves. The wild beast is in its native state, and hastens, when relieved from artificial constraints, to return to the forest wilds as to its natural condition. The forest-man—is he too in his natural condition? for Europe’s sons have, for upwards of three centuries, been levelling his forests, and planting their civilisation on the clearings, yet he accepts not their civilisation as a higher goal for him. He, at least, thinks that the white man and the red are of diverse natures; that the city and the cultivated field are for the one, but the wild forest and the free chase for the other. He does not envy the white man, he only wonders at him as a being of a different nature.

Broken-Arm, the Chief of the Crees, receiving the traveller Paul Kane and his party into his lodge, at their encampment in the valley of the Saskatchewan, told him the following tradition of the tribe. One of the Crees became a Christian. He was a very good man, and did what was right; and when he died he was taken up to the white man’s heaven, where everything was very beautiful. All were happy amongst their friends and relatives who had gone before them; but the Indian could not share their joy, for everything was strange to him. He met none of the spirits of his ancestors to welcome him: no hunting nor fishing, nor any of those occupations in which he was wont to delight. Then the Great Manitou called him, and asked him why he was joyless in His beautiful heaven; and the Indian replied that he sighed for the company of the spirits of his own people. So the Great Manitou told him that he could not send him to the Indian heaven, as he had, whilst on earth, chosen this one; but as he had been a very good man, he would send him back to earth again.

The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he discerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties; why should the one covet the nature of the other? Hence one element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. He, at least, does not overlook, in his sylvan philosophy, that feature in the physical history of mankind, which Agassiz complained of having been neglected: viz., the natural relations between different types of man and the animals and plants inhabiting the same regions. Yet the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie memorials of an older native civilisation; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely-scattered tribes of the American continent,^[2] have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods.

In that old East, to which science still turns when searching for the cradle-land of the human family, vast areas exist, the characteristics of which seem to stamp with unprogressive endurance the inheritors of the soil. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Levant, and stretching from the Persian Gulf into the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, are still found seats of civilisation coexistent with the earliest dawn of man’s history. But beyond these lies the elevated table-land of Central Asia, stretching away northward, and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilising courses into the frozen waters of the Arctic circle. Abrupt mountain-chains subdivide this elevated plateau into regions which have been for unrecorded ages the hives of pastoral tribes, unaffected by any intrusion of civilising arts or settled social habits; until, impelled by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent of Europe.

From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable portion of the Bulgarians of modern Europe; while the sterile peninsula of Arabia has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. Yet the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or the Turk, transferred to new physical conditions, and subjected to higher moral and intellectual influences; or the wondrous intellectual vigour of the Arab of Bagdad or Cordova: affords no scale by which to gauge the immobility of the Tartar on his native steppe, or the Arab in his desert wilderness. Without agriculture or any idea of property in land, destitute of the very rudiments of architecture, knowing no written law, or any form of government save the patriarchal expansion to the tribe of the primitive family ties: we can discern no change in the wild nomad, though we trace him back for three thousand years. Migratory offshoots of the hordes of Central Asia, and of the wanderers of the Arabian desert, have gone forth to prove the capacity for progress of the least progressive races; but the great body tarries still in the wilderness and on the steppe, to prove what an enduring capacity man also has to live as one of the wild fauna of the waste.

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.