criticism. Indeed, he purposely records not merely those facts which are indisputably true, but the larger class of facts which have not been proved to be untrue.

*

It is scarcely necessary for us to call attention to the opportuneness of this work. The red man is swiftly passing away before the face of the white, and every day destroys some trace of the former. The westward advance of the frontier of the Eastern States is estimated by Professor Wilson to average nine miles per annum; and the trapper and woodsman, the advance guard of European civilisation, are steadily marching onwards to the setting sun, followed closely by the ranchero and tiller of the soil, The Pacific coast affords another base for the approach of the Europeans from the east. From the Golden Gate' and other places which have sprung up as it were by magic, the banners of civilisation have steadily passed forward to the east, until the lands of the red man, from the British possessions in latitude 40° down to the frontiers of Mexico, are to be found mainly between the Sierra Nevada and the Mississippi; beyond these boundaries, if he exist at all, it is as a servant, and even in this tract the lines of railway, which may aptly be termed the iron bonds of civilisation, are bases of attack. The vast mineral wealth of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and California offer irresistible allurements to the gold and silver miner; the buffalo-the great staff of life-is rapidly perishing under the rifles of the trapper and English sportsmen, and consequently the red hunter, listless and incapable of adapting himself to the changing conditions of life, has the choice of dying of starvation, of living by plunder and being eventually shot down, or of submitting to the charity of the white man, exposed to the unutterable evils which flow from the contact of civilised with uncivilised peoples. Their history must be seized now, or it will be lost for ever. To us,' says our author, the savage 'nations of America have neither past nor future, only a brief 'present, from which we may judge somewhat of their past' (ii. 81). The stone implements, tumuli, and rude rock sculptures are rapidly becoming as non-historic as similar relics of barbarism in Europe, and in many regions the memory of the ancient inhabitants is preserved only in the names of the mountains and of the rivers. At this time, therefore, such a work as this, done by a man living in the great metropolis of the West, and personally conversant with many of the rude tribes about which he writes, is singularly opportune. Its subject-matter, indeed, is not accurately expressed in its title, for it embraces

* Prehistoric Man, ii. 302.

not merely the native races of the Pacific States, but also the Eskimos of the Arctic Sea, and the inhabitants of the British territories. It includes, as well, the history of Mexico and Central America.

The interest which Mr. Bancroft's book has for us does not lay so much with the rapidly vanishing savage tribes as with the evidence as to the origin of the American peoples, and of that extraordinary civilisation which was crushed in Mexico, Central America, and Peru under the heel of the ignorant and bigoted Spaniard. In discussing these points we shall use the materials collected together by Professor Wilson in his last edition of Prehistoric Man;' an admirable work, in which the history of the American tribes and civilisation lies hidden under a misleading title.

The first point which offers itself for examination is the vexed question of the origin of the American peoples:—

'The problem' (writes Mr. Bancroft)' of the origin of the American aborigines is, in my opinion, enveloped in as much obscurity now as it ever was; and when I consider the close proximity of the north-western and north-eastern extremities of America to Asia and Europe; the unthought-of and fortuitous circumstances that may at any time have cast any people upon the American coasts; the mighty convulsions that may have changed the whole face of the earth during the uncounted years that man may have dwelt upon its surface; and lastly, the uncertainty, perhaps I might say improbability, of the descent of mankind from one pair; when I think of all these things it seems to me that the peopling of America may have been accomplished in so many ways that no more hopeless task could be conceived than the endeavour to discover the one particular manner of it.' (Vol. v. p. 6.)

We agree with Mr. Bancroft that it would be hopeless to ascertain the precise manner in which man first arrived in America, but we believe that the evidence as to the ancestry of the present tribes is as clear as such evidence could possibly be under the circumstances. In discussing this question, Mr. Bancroft is influenced by the view that man was created in several regions, and that America was one of the primeval centres of creation-a view which has met with greater favour in America than among the naturalists of Europe. The unity of the human race, that all mankind sprang from one pair, is to our mind as indisputable as the fact that all horses and cows sprang from a single pair; and when we consider that the main features traceable in the American races, the Eskimo excepted, are those of the Polynesians, of the Japanese, Chinese, and Samoides, the conclusion that they are of Asiatic extraction, held by Humboldt, Prescott, Tschudi, and Wilson,

seems altogether satisfactory. Mr. Bancroft points out that the north-eastern districts have been peopled at least in part from Asia. Since 1782, according to Mr. Brookes, there have been forty-one wrecks of Japanese vessels on the American coast, twenty-eight of which date from 1850. Only twelve of these were deserted, and the survivors of the rest remained in the district where they were landed. These vessels are merely those which happen to have been recorded. They have been swept across the Pacific by the great current, which brings them from the Japanese seas at the rate of twelve miles an hour. We are therefore justified in the belief that during the untold centuries in which this current has been setting towards America, it has borne upon its bosom a constant supply of emigrants from Asia, either willingly or unwillingly. Traces of the Japanese language are to be found in the dialect of the Chinooks. The population round the region of Behring's Straits is indisputably Mongoloid (v. 38).

The physical barriers imposed by the wide stretch of ocean, or by the severity of winter in the northern latitudes, are certainly not greater than those which have been overcome by the Mongoloid races in finding their way to New Zealand, or to the Society or the Sandwich Islands. We are in a position to say, after coming fresh from the first two of these places into contact with the Piutes of Nevada, that there are no differences between the two which cannot be explained by the fact of the one living in a maritime and insular region, while the other lives merely by hunting. The distribution of the Mongoloid type of mankind as defined by Professor Huxley is in harmony with the distribution of other types of mankind, and we may add, with that of some of the wild animals also. the north-east it touches the Baltic, and sweeps on uninterruptedly through Asia to Behring's Straits, and to the south and east it is met with in most of the islands of the Pacific; and if identity of physique be of any value in classification, and man be treated simply as a wild animal would be treated, the two Americas must be added to the enormous area over which the Mongolians have wandered. Professor Wilson has proved that the so-called American type is altogether mythic, and that among the native tribes there are diversities of complexion, hair, feature, skull-form, and physique decidedly analogous to those of Asia.

On

The spreading eastward of the Mongolian peoples from Asia may have been largely aided by geographical conditions which no longer exist. The elks, reindeer, foxes, wolves, bears, and other animals common to Euro-Asia and North America, pro

bably crossed over from one region to the other on a bridge of land. The researches of Mr. Darwin into the coral reefs prove that there are large areas in the Pacific which are now gradually sinking, and the clusters of islands are merely the higher parts of a submerged continent. America may have been peopled, and probably was, in three different ways, successively or possibly simultaneously; the most obvious route being that by way of Behring's Straits; another is offered by the Japanese current; and lastly, the same kind of enterprise which led the Sandwich Islanders to find their way to Tahiti, would surely lead some of the bold sailors of the Pacific to the shores of the New World. The idea of any people whatever being autochthones, in our opinion must be given up, in the face of the continual migrations and drifting to and fro of peoples revealed by the modern school of ethnology. The Mongoloid origin of the American peoples is proved by an appeal solely to natural history, without reference to the relics of the civilisation of Mexico and Central America, which we shall discuss in another place.

Man must have inhabited America for a very long period to allow of the observed diversities in language.

On any theory of human origin' (writes Professor Wilson), '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.' (Prehistoric Man, vol. i. p. 12.)

To pass over the idle speculations of American colonies of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Welsh-we think that our author might have omitted the book of Mormon from among his authorities-the evidence that the Scandinavians found their way to the New World in pre-Columbian times seems to us conclusive. It has, however, been disputed by no less authorities than George Bancroft, the historian of American colonisation, and Washington Irving, who have summarily disposed of their claims to the discovery of America, without any critical analysis of the historical value of the Icelandic Sagas, on which they are based. These Sagas are known as

the Codex Flatoiensis, a manuscript dating from the close of the fourteenth century, supposed to have been lost for many years, eventually found in the library of the island of Flatöe, and now preserved in the archives of Copenhagen. The antiquity of this work has never been seriously disputed, and the story of the voyages of the Northmen to America is proved not to have been an interpolation in an old work, by the fact that they form the framework of the narrative, which would be utterly destroyed by their omission. They cannot therefore be viewed as post-Columbian interpolations into a record of pre-Columbian events. They are a plain straightforward account of the doings of certain adventurers, who set forth, not for purposes of discovery, but for purposes of gain; and there is not the least intimation that the writers had any idea of the magnitude of the discoveries which they relate. Had these been mere echoes of the discoveries of Columbus, it seems to us impossible that the narrative would have been so artless and simple as we find it. Their style, we may add, is distinctly that of the heroic age of Scandinavian enterprise, such as the Heimskringla, or the Orkneyinga Saga. It would have been impossible for a writer of the sixteenth century to have imitated successfully the older Sagas without being detected by his contemporaries, or betraying himself by the insertion of some detail belonging to his own time. We therefore believe that the Codex is genuine, and accept the narrative to be as truly historic as the pages of Froissart, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We are quite aware that there is a prejudice against the historic value of these Sagas among some modern critics, the grounds for which we have never been able to discover. It is very generally urged against their credibility that the statements of the wintering in Greenland, and of the fruits of Vinland are not consistent with the present climate in those regions. To our mind they give the stamp of genuineness and antiquity to the narrative, because now we have evidence from other quarters that the climate of Greenland, and consequently that also of the adjoining coast of America, has become more severe than it was when the deserted Danish settlements were founded. A similar change has also taken place in the climate of Iceland. The story of the discovery of America by the Northmen is not generally known to English readers, and we will therefore give it in some little detail.

Eric the Redemigrated from Iceland to Greenland in the spring of 986, along with Heriulf Bardson. In the autumn Biarne, a son of the latter, set sail from Iceland to join his father, and after having been driven out of his way by fogs and winds into