PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 79 



regarded as a different race from the Americans, which is expressly denied. It is 

 remarked that the civilized states do not stand isolated from their barbarous neigh- 

 bors, but that these gradually merge into each other, so that some nations are with 

 difficulty classed with either division, and that the diversity is not greater than 

 has been known to exist between the same people, in other parts of the world, at 

 different periods of their history. The intellectual disparity that is pointed out 

 as existing between the Mongolians and Malays, and the more barbarous Ame- 

 ricans, would seem to admit of some qualification. The latter are regarded as 

 decidedly of an inferior nature; as not only averse to the restraints of education, 

 but, for the most part, incapable of a continued process of reasoning upon abstract 

 subjects; as wanting mechanical ingenuity, and as possessing but an humble grade 

 of the imitative faculty. " Savage or civilized, the sea has had few charms for the 

 American, and his navigation has been almost exclusively confined to lakes and 

 rivers, and a canoe, excavated from a single log, has been his principal vessel. On 

 the other hand, the Mongolians and Malays are proverbially aquatic in their habits, 

 and exhibit a considerable degree of mechanical contrivance. Their greater con- 

 structiveness is exhibited in their dwellings, as well as in their implements and 

 utensils, while an absence of the courage, cunning, cruelty, and improvidence, that 

 are so habitual in the red man, is characteristic of the moral nature of the 

 Eskimaux. These people, too, are remarkable for a large and rather elongated 

 head, which is low in front and projecting behind ; great width and flatness of the 

 face; eyes small and black; mouth small and round; and nose so diminutive and 

 depressed that, on looking at a skull in profile, the nasal bones are hardly visible. 

 Their complexion, moreover, is comparatively fair, and there is a tendency through- 

 out life to fulness and obesity. It is stated by the traveller Hearne that the Indian 

 tribes who are their proximate neighbors on the south once excused an unprovoked 

 massacre of Eskimaux men, women, and children, by asserting that they were a 

 people of a different nature and origin from themselves." 



Dr. Morton adverts to the opinion of Gallatin, that analogies of words and gram- 

 matical forms prove the cognate relation of the Eskimaux and other Indians. 

 This he pronounces a mere postulate. " For, from the evidence adduced in respect 

 to the ethnographic difference between these people, we have a right to infer that 

 the resemblance in their respective languages has not been derived by the greater 

 from the lesser source — not by the Americans from the Eskimaux — but the reverse; 

 for the Asiatics, having arrived at various periods, and in small parties, would natu- 

 rally, if not unavoidably, adopt more or less of the language of the people among 

 whom they settled, until their own dialects finally merged in those of the Indians 

 who bound them on the south." 1 



In addition to what has been said of the Mongolian features, as seen in the 

 Eskimaux, it is remarked that there are some characters so prevalent as to per- 

 vade all the ramifications of the great Mongolian stock, from the repulsive Calmuck 



1 Latham seems to accord with Morton on this point. "Physically, the Eskimaux is a Mongol 

 and Asiatic; philologically, he is an American, at least in respect to the principles upon which his 

 speech is constructed." — Varieties of Man, p. 288. 



