PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 97 



A recent contributor to the Protestant Episcopal Quarterly Revieio, published in 

 New York, gives his countenance to the idea, that the Anglo-American is gradually 

 assuming the physical type of the aborigines, and seems to regard the tendency as 

 varying according to the special influence of particular localities. Thus, he 

 believes that the New Englander is acquiring the craniological formation of the 

 family of tribes to whom he has succeeded as possessor of the soil, whose skulls 

 differed somewhat from those of the Indians in general. 1 



In referring to the various aspects which archaeological science, as applied to 

 this country, has from time to time presented, the endeavor has been to maintain 

 the order of progression so far as practicable, while regarding also the natural con- 

 nection of different theories, and their bearing upon one another. 



Advancing from that stage of opinion when the necessity of looking abroad for 

 the origin of our primitive population was almost universally acknowledged, and 

 when the belief prevailed that physical, moral, and traditionary evidence pointed 

 to Asia as the principal source whence that population was derived, we entered 

 upon one in which another class of sentiments predominated. In this, the deduc- 

 tions from an analysis of dialects, the results of physiological and palteontolo- 

 gical investigations, and the conclusions of men of science respecting a radical 

 diversity of races, were combined to favor the hypothesis of an independent and 

 indigenous creation of man in America. We have now come out upon a conjunc- 

 tion of theories, claiming a scientific foundation, from which a new series of infer- 

 ences may be drawn. 



Agassiz and Guyot mutually recognize a peculiar homogeneity in the geological 

 structure of the American continent, from which a like homogeneity might be 

 expected to exist, or to be produced in its animal and vegetable kingdoms seve- 

 rally, such as observation has shown to be the case. 



Professor Guyot has superadded the conception that vegetative life is here uni- 

 versally paramount over animal vitality, absorbing the elements of growth and 

 vigor, and affecting the development not only of inferior orders, but of the primi- 

 tive man, whose nature, inert and passive, is held to be deficient in those mental 

 and corporeal energies which have marked and diversified the history of his race 

 in other lands. 



Moreover, aside from the deteriorating influence ascribed to the climate, it is 

 alleged, as has been seen, that it possesses the quality of changing the physical, 

 and, as a consequence, the mental characters, of other varieties of man, into those 

 which distinguish the families that constitute the American division. 



And while the tendency to this metamorphosis has, by one authority, been con- 

 sidered stronger in the Southern States, others declare it to be now in gradual but 

 perceptible progress among the Anglo-Saxons of New England. 



Thus, if the argument rested on these physical propositions alone, all the nations 

 of the earth might, at some former period, have contributed to the population of the 

 western hemisphere, as they are doing now, and in process of time all traces of dis- 

 tinction would have become obliterated in a common and irresistible degeneracy. 



1 Prot. Episc. Pev., Julv, 1855, p. 330. 

 13 



