PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 105 



While recording the various forms of opinion that have sprung from philological 

 and physiological observations in this country, we hope that sufficient care has 

 been taken to avoid giving any adscititious weight to particular views. If ideas 

 opposed to the original unity of mankind appear anywhere to be relatively promi- 

 nent, it is owing, perhaps, to the circumstance that whatever conforms to general 

 opinion arrests attention less than that which differs from it. It is only as ideas, 

 which their authors have connected with our subject in a manner not to admit of 

 separation, that they find a place in our pages. As a portion of the bibliography 

 of American Archaeology they can neither be omitted with propriety nor be so 

 disguised as to conceal their tendency. The great question of human unity or 

 diversity rests upon a far wider survey of men and nations than the ethnology of 

 this continent comprehends; and all local facts or phenomena require to be asso- 

 ciated with researches linguistic, physiological, and historical, as general and 

 thorough as those of Prichard and Bunsen, before they can prudently be made the 

 basis of argument, much less the foundation of faith. The conclusions of Prichard 

 and Bunsen appear not to have been invalidated in their own estimation by any 

 phases of human condition or conformation developed in the New World; Hum- 

 boldt's personal researches in this hemisphere have not impaired his faith in the 

 singleness of human origin; 1 and one of our historians, at the close of an elaborate 

 survey of the American aborigines in connection with other races, asserts that " the 

 indigenous population of America offers no new obstacle to faith in the unity of 

 the human race." 2 



Having endeavored to present in a connected form the various aspects which 

 philological analysis and physical science have given to the question of the origin 

 or derivation of the Indian race, we may continue the chronological resume of 

 leading publications that relate, either specially or inclusively, to the antiquities of 

 our national territory. 



At about the period of 1830, a rage for migration to the West spread like an 

 epidemic through the Eastern States. In New England particularly, under the 

 influence of a depressed condition of manufacturing and commercial enterprise, the 

 feeling was prevalent that the Atlantic States, with a sterile or exhausted soil, must 

 decline in wealth and population before the rising importance of the productive 

 regions of the Mississippi Valley. While the Southern emigrant transferred the 

 movable appurtenances of his plantation to Louisiana or Arkansas, the farmers of 

 Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, sought some locality between the 

 Ohio and the Great Lakes. From Illinois and Michigan they soon advanced into 

 the Territory of Wisconsin, and prepared the way for the discovery of a new and 

 curious class of antiquities. At that time, during half a dozen or more succeeding 

 years, the press was prolific of Notes on the Western States, Guide Books, Sketches 

 of Travel, Letters from Emigrants, and other publications descriptive of the 

 country, in which a chapter was often bestowed upon mounds and other ancient 



' See "Cosmos," Vol. I, closing chapter. 

 2 Bancroft's History of the United States, III, 318. 

 14 



