AMERICAN ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 157 



limit of the Esquimaux. The sJcrdlings who came on the sea in skin 

 canoes (Jiudhkeipr), and hurled their spears with slings {valslongva), 

 seem by these very facts to have been probably Esquimaux, and the 

 mention of their being swarthy, with great eyes and broad cheeks, 

 agrees tolerably with this. The statement usually made that the 

 word sJcrciling meant " dwarf " would, if correct, have settled the ques- 

 tion ; but, unfortunately, there is no real warrant for this etymology. 

 If we may take it that Esquimaux eight hundred years ago, before 

 they had ever found their way to Greenland, were hunting seals on 

 the coast of Newfoundland, and caribou in the forest, their life need 

 not have been very unlike what it is now in their Arctic home. Some 

 day, perhaps, the St. Lawrence and Newfoundland shores will be 

 searched for relics of Esquimau life, as has been done with such suc- 

 cess in the Aleutian Islands by Mr. W. H. Dall, though on this side of 

 the continent we can hardly expect to find, as he does, traces of long 

 residence and rise from a still lower condition. 



Surveying now the vast series of so-called native, or indigenous, 

 tribes of North and South America, we may admit that the fundamental 

 notion on which American anthropology has to be treated is its rela- 

 tion to Asiatic. This kind of research is, as we know, quite old, but 

 the recent advances of zoology and geology have given it new breadth 

 as well as facility. The theories which account for the wide-lying 

 American tribes, disconnected by language as they are, as all descend- 

 ed from ancestors who came by sea in boats, or across Behring Strait 

 on the ice, may be felt somewhat to strain the probabilities of migra- 

 tion, and are likely to be remodeled under the information now sup- 

 plied by geology as to the distribution of animals. It has become a 

 familiar fact that the Equidce, or horse-like animals, belong even more 

 remarkably to the New than to the Old World. There was plainly 

 land-connection between America and Asia, for the horses whose re- 

 mains are fossil in America to have been genetically connected with 

 the horses reintroduced from Europe. The deer may have passed from 

 the Old World into North America in the Pliocene period ; and the 

 opinion is strongly held that the camels came the other way, originat- 

 ing in America and spreading thence into Asia and Africa. The mam- 

 moth and the reindeer did not cross over a few thousand years ago 

 by Behring Strait, for they had been since Pleistocene times spread 

 over the north of what was then one continent. To realize this an- 

 cient land-junction of Asia and America, this " Tertiary bridge," to 

 use Professor Marsh's expression, it is instructive to look at Mr. Wal- 

 lace's chart of the present soundings, observing that an elevation 

 of under two hundred feet would make Behring Strait land, while 

 moderately shallow sea extends southward to about the line of the 

 Aleutian Islands, below which comes the plunge into the ocean-depths. 

 If, then, we are to consider America as having received its human 

 population by ordinary migration of successive tribes along this high- 



