drawing suggests its Algonkin origin. Scandinavians may have reached the shores of Labrador; the soil of the United States has not one vestige of their presence.

An ingenious writer on the maritime history of the Chinese finds traces of their voyages to America in the fifth century, and thus opens an avenue for Asiatic science to pass into the kingdom of Anahuac; but the theory refutes itself. If Chinese traders or emigrants came so recently to America, there would be customs and language to give evidence of it. Nothing is so indelible as speech: sounds that, in ages of unknown antiquity, were spoken among the nations of Hindostan, still live in their significancy in the language which we daily utter. The winged word cleaves its way through time, as well as through space. If Chinese came to civilize, and came so recently, the shreds of Asiatic civilization would be still clinging visibly to all their works.

Nor does the condition of astronomical science in aborigi nal America prove a connection with Asia. The red men could not but observe the pole-star; and even their children could give the names and trace the motions of the more brilliant groups of stars, of which the return marked the seasons; but they did not divide the heavens, nor even a belt in the heavens, into constellations. It is a curious coincidence that, among the Algonkins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, alike among the Narragansetts and the Illinois, the north star was called the bear. This accidental agreement with the widely spread usage of the Old World is far more observable than the imaginary resemblance between the signs of the Mexicans for their days and the signs on the zodiac for the month in Thibet. The American nation had no zodiac, and could not therefore, for the names of its days, have borrowed from Central Asia the symbols that marked the path of the sun through the year. Nor had the Mexicans either weeks or lunar months; but, after the manner of barbarous nations, they divided the days in the year into eighteen scores, leaving the few remaining days to be set apart by themselves. This division. may have sprung directly from their system of enumeration;

it need not have been imported. It is a greater marvel that the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico had a nearly exact knowledge of the length of the year, and, at the end of one hundred and four years, made their intercalation more accurately than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Egyptians. The length of their tropical year was almost identical with the result obtained by the astronomers of the caliph Almamon; but let no one derive this coincidence from intercourse, unless he is prepared to believe that, in the ninth century of our era, there was commerce between Mexico and Bagdad. The agreement favors clearly the belief that Mexico did not learn of Asia; for, at so late a period, intercourse between the continents would have left its

indisputable traces. No inference is warranted, except that, in the clear atmosphere of the table-lands of Central America, the observers may have watched successfully the progress of the seasons; that the sun ran his career as faithfully over the heights of the Cordilleras as over the plains of Mesopotamia.

When to this is added that, alone of mankind, the American nations universally were ignorant of the pastoral state; that they kept neither sheep nor kine; that they knew not the use of the milk of animals for food; that they had neither wax nor oil; that they had no iron, it becomes nearly certain that the imperfect civilization of America is its own.

Yet the original character of American culture does not insulate the American race. It would not be safe to reject the possibility of an early communication between South America and the Polynesian world. Nor can we know what changes time may have wrought on the surface of the globe, what islands may have been submerged, what continents divided. But, without resorting to the conjectures or the fancies which geologists may suggest, everywhere around us there are signs of migrations, of which the boundaries cannot be set; and the movement seems to have been towards the east and south.

The number of primitive languages increases near the Gulf of Mexico; and, as if one nation had crowded upon

another, in the canebrakes of the state of Louisiana there are more independent languages than are found from the Arkansas to the pole. In like manner, they abounded on the plateau of Mexico, the natural highway of wanderers. On the western shore of America, there are more languages than on the east; on the Atlantic coast, as if to indicate that it had never been a thoroughfare, one extended from Cape Fear to the Esquimaux; on the west, between the latitude of forty degrees and the Esquimaux, there were at least four or five. The Californians derived their ancestors from the north; the Aztecs preserve a narrative of their northern origin, which their choice of residence in a mountain region confirmed.

At the north, the continents of Asia and America nearly meet. In the latitude of sixty-five degrees fifty minutes, a line across Behring's Straits, from Cape Prince of Wales to Cape Tschowkotskoy, would measure a fraction less than forty-four geographical miles; and three small islands divide the distance.

But, within the latitude of fifty-five degrees, the Aleutian Isles stretch from the great promontory of Alaska so far to the west, that the last of the archipelago is but three hundred and sixty geographical miles from the east of Kamtschatka; and that distance is so divided by the Mednoi Island and the group of Behring, that, were boats to pass from islet to islet from Kamtschatka to Alaska, the longest navigation in the open sea would not exceed two hundred geographical miles, and at no moment need the mariner be more than forty leagues distant from land; and a chain of thickly set isles extends from the south of Kamtschatka to Corea. Now the Micmac on the north-east of our continent would, in his frail boat, venture thirty or forty leagues out at sea: a Micmac savage then, steering from isle to isle, might in his birch-bark canoe have made the voyage from North-west America to China.

Water, ever a favorite highway, is especially the highway of uncivilized man: to those who have no axes, the thick jungle is impervious; canoes are older than wagons, and ships than chariots; a gulf, a strait, the sea intervening

between islands, divide less than the matted forest. Even civilized man emigrates by sea and by rivers, and he ascended two thousand miles above the mouth of the Missouri, while interior tracts in New York and Ohio were still a wilderness. To the uncivilized man, no path is free but the sea, the lake, and the river.

The American and the Mongolian races of men, on the two sides of the Pacific, have a near resemblance. Both are alike strongly and definitely marked by the more capacious palatine fossa, of which the dimensions are so much larger that a careful observer could, out of a heap of skulls, readily separate the Mongolian and American from the Caucasian, but could not distinguish them from each other. Both have the orbit of the eye quadrangular, rather than oval; both, especially the American, have comparatively a narrowness of the forehead; the facial angle in both, but especially in the American, is comparatively small; in both, the bones of the nose are flatter and broader than in the Caucasian, and in so equal a degree, and with apertures so similar, that, on indiscriminate selections of specimens from the two, an observer could not, from this feature, discriminate which of them belonged to the old continent; both, but especially the Americans, are characterized by a prominence of the jaws. The elongated occiput is common to the American and the Asiatic; and there is to each very nearly the same obliquity of the face. Between the Mongolian of Southern Asia and of Northern Asia there is a greater difference than between the Mongolian Tâtar and the North American. The Iroquois is more unlike the Peruvian than he is unlike the wanderer on the steppes of Siberia. Physiology has not succeeded in defining the qualities which belong to every well-formed Mongolian, and which never belong to an indigenous American; still less can geographical science draw a boundary line between the races. The Athapascas cannot be distinguished from Algonkin Knisteneaux on the one side, or from Mongolian Esquimaux on the other. The dwellers on the Aleutian Isles melt into resemblances with the inhabitants of each continent; and, at points of remotest distance, the difference

is still so inconsiderable that Ledyard, whose curiosity filled him with the passion to circumnavigate the globe and cross its continents, as he stood in Siberia, with men of the Mongolian race before him, and compared them with the Indians who had been his old play-fellows and schoolmates at Dartmouth, writes deliberately that, "universally and circumstantially, they resemble the aborigines of America." On the Connecticut and the Obi, he saw but one race.

He that describes the Tungusians of Asia seems also to describe the North American. That the Tschukchi of North-eastern Asia and the Esquimaux of America are of the same origin is proved by the affinity of their languages; thus establishing a connection between the continents previous to the discovery of America by Europeans. The indigenous population of America offers no new obstacle to faith in the unity of the human race.