15 ARCHEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



are accidental, and applicable only to particular instances; and although philo- 

 logical and physiological affinities with other races should be equally well estab- 

 lished, the argument drawn from' radical peculiarities and idiosyncrasies may still 

 remain unsubverted, so long as the latter are paramount, 



If, in the process of reasoning, a lapse of time, whose duration cannot be defined, 

 and an isolation without material interruption, are admitted as probabilities, the 

 comprehensive deductions of leading European ethnologists need not of necessity 

 conflict with those of investigators in this country, which, while claiming that the 

 American aborigines are a distinct and peculiar people, do not deny the primitive 

 unity of the human race. 



The Chevalier Bunsen, in his recent Philosophy of Universal History, remarks : 

 " It is not yet proved in detail, but it appears highly probable, in conformity with 

 our general principles, that the native language of the northern continent of 

 America, comprising tribes and nations of very different degrees of civilization, 

 from the Eskimaux of the polar regions to the Aztecs of Mexico, are of one origin, 

 and a scion of the Turanian tribe. The similarity in the configuration of the skull 

 renders this affinity highly probable." 



Having subserviently to writing the above seen the first three volumes of Mr. 

 Schoolcraft's national work, he adds: " But the linguistic data before us, combined 

 with the traditions and customs, and particularly with the system of pictorial or 

 mnemonic writing (first revealed in that work) enable me to say, that the Asiatic 

 origin of all these tribes is as fully proved as the unity of the family among them- 

 selves. According to our system, the Indian languages can only be a deposit of a 

 north Turanian idiom. The Mongolian peculiarity of the skull, the type of the 

 hunter, the Shamanic excitement, which leads by means of fasting and dreams into 

 a visionary or clairvoyant state, and the fundamental religious views, and symbols, 

 among which the tortoise is not to be forgotten, (II. 390.) bring us back to primi- 

 tive Turanism. As to the languages themselves, there is no one peculiarity in 

 them which may not easily be explained by our theory of the secondary formation 

 and the consequences of isolation. The verity of the grammatical type was long 

 ago acknowledged, but we have now (as I think) the evidence of the material, 

 historical, physical unity. The Indian mind has not only worked in one type but 

 with one material, and that a Turanian one." (Vol. II. pp. 111-13.) 



" We thus see that a very considerable part of the inhabitants of America, and 

 the Polynesian Islands, belong to that one great family which we call the Turanian 

 race, and that the former travelled off from the Mongolian, and the latter from 

 Malay tribes." (Ibid., pp. 115.) 



"The first, however, to trace with a bold hand the broad outlines of the Tura- 

 nian, or as he called it, the Scythian philology, was Bask. He proved that the 

 Finnic had once been spoken in the northern extremities of Europe, and that 

 allied languages extended like a girdle over the north of Asia, Europe, and 

 America. In his inquiries into the origin of the Old Norse, he endeavors to link 

 the idioms of Asia and America by means of the Gronlancl language, which he 

 maintains is a scion of the Scythian or Turanian stock, spreading its branches over 

 the north of America, and thus indicating the antediluvian bridge between the con- 



