152 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



dialects are adduced as an exemplification of the principle that if the work of 

 agglutination has once commenced, without any literature to keep it within limits, 

 the languages of tribes separated only for a few generations will become mutually 

 unintelligible. (Bunsen, Phil, of Un. Hist., I. 480, et seq.) 1 



It thus appears that a common element required by philological theories, whether 

 European or American, respecting the origin of population in this country, is time — 

 no less than all the time that history can grant ; and while they go back nearly to 

 the most primitive form of human utterance for a matrix in which the American 

 system of speech might have been cast, they demand for the special development 

 of that system, and the peculiar phenomena it exhibits, a protracted term of 

 isolation. (See ante, pp. 63-4.) 



A like duration of separate existence would go far to explain the physical pecu- 

 liarities and idiosyncrasies of the American race. A divergence from their kindred 

 types would seem to be the inevitable result of disconnection for ages, under dif- 

 ferent influences, moral and material; and while changes of conformation might be 

 philosophically anticipated, the fact that a wild and savage life tends to promote phy- 

 sical uniformity, as domestication and civilization tend to produce variety, may 

 suffice to account for the common direction those changes have taken. 



And having the element of time granted, we may go behind the commencement 

 of Chinese, Japanese, and other forms of Mongolian culture, and imagine the 

 ancestors of our aborigines to have been still mere wanderers, without arts, and 

 with no religious faith save the primitive oriental worship of the Sun. While the 

 parent stock upon the eastern continent would attain to whatever development it 

 might reach under circumstances not entirely excluding it from being acted upon 

 and instructed by other races, the offshoot in America would experience no external 



* The anonymous author of a recent treatise possessing a high degree of literary and scholastic merit, 

 draws the following conclusions from his studies and observations. 



"That the first stock of man was created in the equatorial region of Africa; * * or in other 

 words, that the true negro, the aboriginal inhabitant of Nigritia, is the primary variety of our species. 



"That from the Nigritian stock, in regions eqni-distant from the equator, sprang the Hottentots 

 and the Chinese; whose striking mutual resemblance has been remarked by the accurate Barrow. 

 And that from the Chinese sprang all the Mongolian, or Turanian races, extending from the limits of 

 the Malayan region, through Asia and Europe to the coldest limits of the habitable earth, and through 

 the American continents, pervading every zone of climate. 



" That the Malayan variety, judging from physical and philological evidences together, sprang from 

 a branch of the Mongolian or Turanian Stock nearly allied to the Chinese. 



"That the Caucasian variety was brought into existence after all the other varieties mentioned 

 above had become developed ; commencing with Adam, the man created in the image of God." 

 {The Genesis of the Earth and Man: A critical examination of passages in the Hebrew and 

 Greek Scriptures, chiefly with a view to the solution of the question whether the varieties of the human 

 species be of more than one origin ; &c. &c. Edited by Reginald Stuart Poole, Edin., 1856.) 



" Dr. Prichard, Mr. Pickering, and Hamilton Smith, are of opinion that the African was the primi- 

 tive form and race of man, and that all the others are divergences from this earliest type ; while Dr. 

 Bachman thinks the probability in favor of the supposition that the primitive form and color was inter- 

 mediate between the African and white races ; and that these are therefore variations equally removed 

 from the original." (Smyth's " Unity of the Human Races," p. 2G4.) 





