310 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion of the best preserved specimens to be nothing more than a 

 monkey of an inferior order. 



At any rate, the general laws of the geographical distribntion 

 of beings, and especially that of progressive cantonment, permit 

 us to affirm that man primarily occupied only a very limited part 

 of the globe ; and that, if he is now everywhere, it is because he 

 has covered the whole earth with his emigrant tribes. 



I know that this thought of the peopling of the globe by 

 migrations troubles many minds. It puts us in the face of an 

 immense unknown ; it raises a world of questions, a large number 

 of which may appear to be inaccessible to our research. Thus, I 

 have often been asked : " Why create all these difficulties ? It is 

 much more natural to confine ourselves to the popular move- 

 ments attested by history, and accept autochthonism, especially 

 in the case of the lowest savages. How could the Hottentots and 

 the Fuegians reach their present countries, starting from some 

 undetermined point which you place in the north of Asia ? Such 

 voyages are impossible ; these peoples were born at the Cape of 

 Good Hope and Cape Horn." 



To these conclusions, if not received, I will first answer by an 

 anecdote borrowed from Livingstone, the bearing of which is 

 easy to comprehend. The illustrious traveler tells how in his 

 youth he used to make with his brothers long excursions devoted 

 to natural history. " In one of these exploring tours/' he says, 

 "we went into a limestone quarry, long before the study of 

 . geology had become as common as it has since. It is impossible 

 to express with what joy and astonishment I set myself to pick- 

 ing out the shells which we found in the carboniferous rock. A 

 quarryman looked at me with that air of compassion which a 

 kindly man takes on at the sight of a person of unsound mind. I 

 asked him how the shells came in the rocks. He answered, ' "When 

 God created the rocks, he made the shells and put them there/ " 

 Livingstone adds: "What pains geologists might have spared 

 themselves by adopting the Ottoman philosophy of that work- 

 man ! " I will ask, in turn, Where would geology have been if 

 men of science had adopted that philosophy ? I ask the anthro- 

 pologists to imitate the geologists ; I invite them to inquire how 

 and by what way the most distant peoples have radiated from 

 the center of the first appearance of man to the extremities of the 

 globe. I am not afraid to predict brilliant discoveries to those who 

 will set themselves seriously to the study of numerous well-marked 

 migrations. In this the past permits a glimpse into the future. 



Some years ago, when they talked to me in such language as 

 I have just repeated, they did not fail to add Polynesia to the 

 list of regions which men destitute of all our perfected arts could 

 not reach. You know how completely such assertions have been 



