3 i2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



From that moment the era of migrations to America was 

 opened. It has never been closed since. Every year the winter 

 rebuilds the bridge which connects East Cape with Cape Prince 

 of Wales ; every year a road, comparatively easy for hardy pedes- 

 trians, stretches from one continent to the other ; and we know 

 that the coast populations of the opposite shores take advantage 

 of it to maintain relations. 



Is it not evident that, whenever one of those great movements 

 which we know have agitated Asia made its shocks felt away in 

 distant countries, whenever political or social revolutions over- 

 whelmed them, fugitive or conquered people would have taken 

 this route, of the existence of which they were aware ? To get 

 rid of the idea of migrations over the frozen sea, we should have 

 to assume that all the corresponding regions have enjoyed a per- 

 petual peace from the beginning of Quaternary times ; but such 

 a peace, you know, is not of this world. 



This sea can have been only the principal route followed by 

 the American immigrations. Farther south, the chain formed 

 by the Aleutian Islands and Alaska opens a second route to tribes 

 which have a little skill in navigation. The Aleuts occupy, in 

 Dall's ethnological chart, the whole extremity of the peninsula. 

 By these ways may have taken place what we might call the 

 normal peopling of America. But, bathed on either side by a 

 great ocean, that continent could not fail to profit by the chances 

 of navigation; and we perceive more and more how this must 

 have been the case. "We are now justified in saying that Europe 

 and Africa on one side, and Asia and Oceania on the other, have 

 sent to America a number of involuntary colonists, more consid- 

 erable, probably, than one would be ready to suppose. 



The immigrations, in America as in Europe, have been inter- 

 mittent, and separated sometimes by centuries. America has 

 been peopled as if by a great human river, which, rising in Asia, 

 has traversed the continent from north to south, receiving along 

 its course a few small tributaries. This river resembles the tor- 

 rent streams of which we have examples in France. Usually, and 

 occasionally for years at a time, their bed is nearly dry. Then 

 some great storm comes, and a liquid avalanche descends from 

 the mountains where their sources lie, covers and ravages the 

 plain, turning over the ancient alluviums, stirring up and mixing 

 the old and new materials, and carrying farther each time the 

 debris it has torn up on its passage. Like this has been the 

 career of our ethnological river. Its floods have, besides, often 

 been diverted to the right or left, and it has opened new deriva- 

 tions. It has also had its eddies. But its general direction has 

 not changed, and we can trace it down to the present. 



One of the highest tasks of Americanists will be to ascend to 



