24 TRANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



earth, with the exception perhaps that the greatest extremes are 

 alike unfavorable to the human development. 



It is generally believed that America must have been peopled 

 from the other continent ; but w^hether by the northv^^est passage, 

 or by the northeast, or by some southw^est passage by the Pa- 

 cific islands, or by a sunken continent, is still a question. The 

 existence of wide and deep seas between the Pacific islands and 

 South America within all the human period, if not from the ear- 

 liest geological times, must have rendered that way of passing 

 impracticable for the most primitive men. It is possible that 

 after boats came into use a few individuals would be occasionally 

 drifted by winds and currents, or they may possibly have rowed, 

 to the American shores. The Sandwich Islands were probably 

 first peopled in this way at a date quite recent in comparison with 

 the first population of either continent. Many of the islands of 

 both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans were uninhabited when 

 first discovered. Casual arrivals of a few individuals in a country 

 inhabited by a strange race cannot change the characteristics of 

 that race : they soon perish, or are absorbed. No doubt, such 

 arrivals on the Pacific coasts have taken place in modern times, 

 but the first peopling of the continent cannot be explained in that 

 way. The attempts hitherto made to derive the red Indians from 

 Asia by Behring's Straits have never been satisfactory, and for 

 the reason that they were supposed to have come from northern 

 Asia, and in quite recent times. The manifest insufiiciency of 

 this hypothesis to account for existing diflerences between the 

 peoples of northern Asia (with the exception of the Arctic tribes 

 on either side of the straits) and the American Indians, and more 

 especially the older and more civilized populations of whom very 

 ancient monuments remain, has led some other writers to look for 

 an Asiatic origin by way of islands or continents in the Pacific 

 ocean. Some strong reasons grounded on certain resemblances 

 of form and character, ancient structures, religious rites, and lan- 

 guage, as well as type and color, have been given in support of 

 this view ; but the difficulty has been to find a means of passage. 

 The light to be derived from a due appreciation of the geogra- 

 phical distribution of races in geological time seems likely to 

 reconcile these apparent contradictions and help to remove the 

 difficulties. The certain fact that the Asiatic continent extended 



