THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA. 305 



THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA.* 



Br M. ARMAND DE QUATEEFAGES. 



IN acknowledgment of the unexpected honor that has been 

 done me in calling me to this chair, I have first to perform 

 the very pleasant duty of saluting the foreign and French schol- 

 ars who have responded to the invitation of our committee. I 

 shall do it in few words, but I affirm, in the name of all my 

 colleagues, that they come from the heart. Welcome, gen- 

 tlemen ! 



Unluckily, the same honor imposes on me another task, and a 

 difficult one. It is the usage, in opening a session of the Congress, 

 for the president to make an address to his colleagues respecting 

 the questions that are to occupy them ; and what can I say, con- 

 cerning America, to learned men who make that continent the 

 object of their habitual studies ? I do not merit, as you do, the 

 title of Americanist. Called by the duties of my teacher's office 

 to deal with the history of all human populations, I can not under- 

 take especially a study which is more than sufficient to absorb a 

 whole lifetime. I have much to learn from you, and I thank you 

 in advance for all that you are going to teach me. 



Yet, it is hardly necessary to say, in looking from the point 

 of view of the whole, which has usually been my practice, my 

 thought could not fail to be often directed to that New World the 

 discovery of which opened so many new horizons to nearly all 

 the branches of human knowledge. The question of the ori- 

 gin of its inhabitants appears at the very head of the problems 

 which it sets before the anthropologist. Are the indigenous 

 Americans in any degree relatives of the populations of the other 

 continents ? Or, have they appeared on the lands where we have 

 found them, without any ethnological connection with those 

 populations ? 



You know that both of these opinions have been maintained, 

 and still have their partisans ; and I made known long ago the 

 solution which I had reached. In my view, America was origi- 



and citations by Welsford, Mithridates Minor, p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, 

 see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account 

 of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica. The position of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church emi- 

 nently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the 

 scholastic world. For perhaps the most full and striking account of the manner in which 

 Bcntley lorded it in the scholastic world of his time, see Marks's Life of Bentley, vol. ii, 

 chap, xvii, and especially his contemptuous reply to the judges, as given in vol. ii, pp. 

 211, 212. 



* Address before the eighth meeting of the Congress of Americanists. 

 vol. xxxvin. 21 



