59 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



curred with a race advanced in the art of navigation. A sejjaration 

 of communities under the pressure of storms, earthquakes, volcanic 

 eruptions, may have naturally happened, however, in the earliest 

 times. Neither the man of primitive nor of culture epochs is exempt 

 from the control of the elements on all occasions. We must agree 

 that we may account in great part, and reasonably, for the variation 

 of man by the difference in his present physical surroundings. 



The essential unity of origin of all the races of mankind is believed 

 by the great majority of scientific men. 



The study of the migration of mankind shows us that there has 

 been replacement everywhere; that people now inhabiting any known 

 country have not always inhabited the same tract of land. At the 

 same time suppose our race to vanish entirely from this continent, 

 leaving only ruined cities and implements behind, how difficult would 

 it be to get a true history of our migration hither ! Suppose again 

 we had no certain account of how our forefathers crossed the At- 

 lantic, how diverse would be our traditions ! Europeans have no 

 authentic account of how they came to be in Europe. A great 

 deal of our American dogmatism and Philistinism is to be ascribed 

 to the fact that we know our origin. We came from England or 

 Germany, and that answers such questions sufficiently. It is as 

 far as we usually think. But now we see that we cannot speak 

 of autocthones, or people sprung from the soil they now cultivate. 

 Such a boast has been made by more than one race, indeed by people 

 of such different culture as the ancient Athenians and the modern 

 Esquimaux. So that we may not conclude too rashly that the 

 people who have left only traces in any country are extinct, because 

 they have been replaced by a different population, just as we have 

 replaced in the eastern portion of North America the Indians. Their 

 descendants may exist elsewhere. This seems to be the case in the 

 present instance, and just as the same kinds of reindeer, butterflies, 

 and plants, of the time when the ice covered these States, no longer 

 live here, but in a far north, so the man of the glacial epoch of the 

 present United States has in all probability wandered after the ice 

 a primitive and unconscious migration determined by the shift- 

 ing of his congenial physical surroundings. And the Esquimaux, 

 as of old skirting the glaciers, the only inhabitants of the shores of 

 Arctic America, and extending in scattered companies for nearly five 

 hundred miles on the coast of Asia beyond Behring's Straits, may 

 well be the modern representatives in a direct line of descent of early 

 man in North America. They were found inhabiting this territory 

 by Europeans first in 1616; and since that time they have been found 

 as far north as we have been able to penetrate. The limit of their 

 range to the southward seems to be about the fiftieth degree of north 

 latitude on the eastern, the sixtieth on the western side of America 

 and the shores of Hudson's Bay. 



