84 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



each constituting a group of this kind. He considers it as acknowledged by all 

 travellers that there is among the latter people a pervading type, a family resem- 

 blance, quite as strong, for example, as that seen at the present day among the 

 full-blooded Jews; yet, although every tribe has some characters that mark it as 

 American, there are certain sharply drawn distinctions among some of these races 

 which cannot be explained by climatic influences. The two divisions adopted by 

 Morton (viz : the Toltecan and the Barbarous tribes) are taken as illustrations. 

 The first (says Dr. Nott) " comprising all the semi-civilized nations of Mexico, 

 Peru, and Bogota, who, there is every reason to believe, were the builders of the 

 great system of mounds found throughout North America," possessed certain cere- 

 bral peculiarities distinguishing them from the savage tribes by whom " the semi- 

 civilized communities of America seem at all times to have been hemmed in and 

 pressed upon as they are at the present day." Mr. Phillips's Appendix to Morton's 

 memoir on The Physical Type of the American Indians, in the second volume of 

 Mr. Schoolcraft's large work, and Mr. George Combe's phrenological remarks in 

 the Appendix to Morton's Crania Americana, are quoted in explanation of this dif- 

 ference. According to these writers, the barbarous tribes have larger brains than 

 those races capable of considerable progress in civilization, but the animal propen- 

 sities outweigh and subordinate the intellectual portion of the character; while in 

 the Mexicans and Peruvians, "the intellectual lobe of the brain is at least as large, 

 and the intellectual and moral qualities being not so subordinate to the propensi- 

 ties and violent passions, are left more free to act." 



This attempt to explain why races possessing an apparently inferior phreno- 

 logical organization should exhibit superior reflective and inventive capacities, is 

 accompanied by the following corollary: — 



" These facts afford very instructive material for reflection. We here behold 

 one race, with the larger though less intellectual brain, subjugating the unwarlike 

 and half-civilized races; and it seems clear that the latter were destined to be 

 either swallowed up or exterminated by the former. Who can doubt that similar 

 occurrences had been going on over this continent for many centuries, or even 

 thousands of years? There are scattered over North America countless tumuli, 

 which it is believed were built by races different from the savage tribes found 

 around them on the advent of the whites, and an impenetrable oblivion rests upon 

 these earth-works. There are many reasons for supposing that these mound- 

 builders were either identical with, or closely allied to, the Toltecs; and that they 

 were driven south, or exterminated by more savage and bellicose races." 



Dr. Nott expresses the opinion that the opposite intellectual and physical cha- 

 racters in the two great American families cannot be explained " except by primi- 

 tive cranial formations, each aboriginally distinct;" and regards it "as more 

 probable that each of these families, instead of springing from a single pair, have 

 originated in many." 



After quoting from the Christian Examiner of July, 1S50, the views of Professor 

 Agassiz upon the natural origin of speech, in which a parallel is drawn between 

 the analogy in sound and structure of the languages of kindred nations and the 

 similarity of intonation of the notes of closely allied species of birds, he suggests, 



