88 ARCHAEOLOGY OP THE UNITED STATES. 



America antedates the Mississippi alluvia, because his bones are fossilized; and 

 that he can even boast of a geological antiquity, because numerous species of ani- 

 mals have been blotted from creation since American humanity's first appearance. 

 The form of the crania, moreover, proves that the general type of races inhabiting 

 America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the 

 period of the Columbian discovery; and this consideration may spare science the 

 trouble of any further speculation on the modes through which the New World 

 became peopled by immigration from the Old." 



In the chapter on the comparative anatomy of races, Dr. Nott maintains that 

 the distinctions between the Americans and the Polynesians are marked and deci- 

 sive; that, with perhaps some very partial exceptions along the Pacific coast, the 

 types of America are entirely distinct from those of Oceanica; and that American 

 languages, civilization,, social institutions, &c, are utterly opposed to Oceanic 

 intluence. " It is," he saj's, " from the so-called Polynesian and Malay races, that 

 many writers have derived the population of America; yet in no' two types of man 

 do we find cranial characters more widely different." * * * " The American 

 heads differ more widely from all Oceanic crania than they do even from those of 

 the Chinese, or true Mongol races. The Oceanic races, including even the Sand- 

 wich Islanders, when compared with our Indians, exhibit crania more elongated, 

 more compressed laterally, less prominent at the vertex, and more prognathous in 

 type. American races are strongly distinguished by the reverse of all these points, 

 in addition to their own greatly flattened occiput." 



The suggestions, speculations, and opinions, collected in the volume now under 

 notice, had, for the most part, been previously advanced in some less connected 

 and more incidental shape — in lectures, in papers communicated to learned socie- 

 ties, in essays, prefaces, and casual discussions, but had not been deliberately 

 applied in this country to the construction of an entire ethnological system. 



In whatever form the views there combined have heretofore found expression, 

 they have been earnestly opposed in the United States, as elsewhere, by those who 

 have deemed them unsound and objectionable. They are to be regarded as indi- 

 vidual sentiments, which, as elements of opinion, are entitled to a place with other 

 materials out of which theories relating to our subject have arisen. 



The late Dr. Samuel Forrey, of New York, published in the American Biblical 

 Repository of July, 1843, an elaborate essay, entitled "Unity of the Human Race 

 confirmed by the Natural History of the American Aborigines." From this we 

 have desired to select salient passages that might be set against those which have 

 been quoted of an opposite bearing; but the subject is treated in a manner that is 

 unfavorable to such a purpose. The investigation is not a technically scientific 

 one, nor does it aim to add to the existing materials of opinion. Receiving Dr. 

 Morton's statements of facts, but rejecting his inferences, Dr. Forrey's design was 

 to show that the former do not necessarily conflict with the reasoning of Prichard, 

 Lawrence, and other naturalists, who believe in the singleness of human origin. 

 He gives a list of authors on tne natural history of man, and of writers on Ameri- 



