HOW THE EARTH WAS PEOPLED. 677 



in Europe at the same date, have come, unless we suppose a direct 

 communication between the two continents ? The difficulty such men 

 would have in crossing the Atlantic and the certainty which sound- 

 ings give of the antiquity of the ocean remove all possibility of our 

 believing either that the two continents were formerly joined, or that 

 one of them was discovered by some unknown Columbus navisfatinsr 

 the ocean a hundred thousand years before the later one. 



We are thus in the presence of the problem, always coming up 

 before us, and always escaping us, of the origin of the American man. 

 Evidently it can not be resolved by invoking an accidental coloniza- 

 tion of Asiatic wanderers, or a shipwrecked company ; but it is one 

 in which we have to deal with primitive populations flowing as in 

 Europe by successive waves, and attesting the continuous presence of 

 man, whose gradual development and extension have followed in 

 America the same course as on the old continent. The hypothesis of 

 an immigration from Asia by way of the Aleutian Islands to Alaska 

 might be acceptable, did not the certainty of the presence of an in- 

 digenous American population in the Quaternary age reduce it to the 

 proportions of a secondary fact. The same is the case with the rela- 

 tions contradictory, it is true, and therefore suspicious which some 

 have attempted to establish between the monuments, statues, and 

 graphic signs of Central America and those of Egypt and Bud- 

 dhistic Asia. These analogies, aside from their insufficiency, must 

 fall before two paramount considerations : first, the certainty of the 

 contemporaneousness of the American man with the great animals of 

 the Quaternary age ; and, second, the relative uniformity of the copper- 

 colored race, so like itself through the whole extent of the continent, 

 except in that part which is occupied by the Esquimaux. The diffi- 

 culty arises from the fact that the monogenists, having in view a 

 single birthplace and a single point of departure for the whole human 

 race, and placing neither in the New World, have supposed America to 

 have been colonized by European or Asiatic immigrants following the 

 direction of the parallels of latitude. Emigration in this direction at 

 once meets an obstacle in the oceans, which grow wider the farther 

 south we go. The obstacle disappears if we give up the idea of lateral 

 emigrations, and suppose the movement to have taken place in the 

 direction of the meridians from north to south. No obstacle of any 

 kind offers itself to such migrations ; and the relative uniformity of 

 the Americans, from one end of the continent to the other, would 

 never have excited astonishment, if we had not been preoccupied with 

 the idea of their introduction at a later date. 



We may remark, on this topic, that the extreme southern points of 

 the three continents are occupied by races which came originally, 

 without doubt, from somewhere else, and which are ranked, in Terra 

 del Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in Tasmania, among the 

 lowest of the species. These races, advancing in front of the others, 



