THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA. 313 



the sources of this river ; to determine the succession of its fresh- 

 ets ; to define the origin and nature of the elements which they 

 have brought down ; to follow these elements from stage to stage, 

 and thus discover the road which each of them has followed to 

 its landing-place in other words, to construct the history of the 

 migrations of the different American peoples. 



The accomplishment of this task will, as I have already said, 

 present other and more difficulties in America than in Polynesia. 

 Those who approach it will have recourse to nothing like the 

 historical charts and the genealogies of which are composed the 

 oral archives religiously preserved in all the islands of the Pacific. 

 But modern science has resources of which we are gaining better 

 and better comprehension of the power. Joining the data fur- 

 nished by the study of the strata and their fossils, by comparative 

 craniology, linguistics, and ethnography, we can enter on the 

 mass of problems and foresee their solution. Serious efforts have 

 been already made in this direction, and they have not been un- 

 fruitful. From this time we shall be able to indicate on the map 

 a considerable number of itineraries, but they are so far partial 

 and local. They are as yet no more than fragments, like those 

 which Hale's predecessors could point to in Oceania. 



The time may be long in coming, but let not Americanists lose 

 heart. Every new discovery, of however little importance it may 

 seem at first, will bring them nearer to the end. From year to 

 year these fragments, now isolated and scattered, will join and be 

 co-ordinated with one another; and some day the map of Ameri- 

 can migrations will be delineated, from Asia to Greenland and 

 Cape Horn, as the map of Polynesian migrations has been drawn, 

 from the Indian Archipelago to Easter Island, and from New 

 Zealand to the Sandwich Islands. Translated for The Popular 

 Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique. 



According to M. J. Roche, the telephone was fore-fancied by Charles Bour- 

 seul, who said, in 1854 : " Imagine that one can speak at a mobile plate so flexible 

 as to lose none of the vibrations produced by the voice, and that this plate in suc- 

 cession establishes and interrupts the communication in an electric pile, and that 

 you have another plate at a distance to execute the same vibrations at exactly the 

 same times. ... I believe it is certain that, in a more or less distant future, 

 speech will in some such way as this be transmitted to a distance by electricity." 



The theory of the European origin of the Aryan race is supported by Canon 

 Isaac Taylor in his book on the origin of the Aryans. Inquiring which of the 

 many races speaking the Aryan languages is the one in which the Aryan form of 

 speech may be presumed to have originated, he numbers four such. They are the 

 Iberians ; the race represented by the Swedes and North Germans ; the Lig'urians, 

 including the Auvergnats and the French Basques ; and the Celto Slavic race. 

 As among these, he decides upon the Celto-Slavs as the nearest to the primitive 

 Aryan stock. 



vol. xxxvm. 22 



