PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 37 
basis the proofs of direct ethnical affinity between them and races of the eastern hemis- 
phere. The ethnological problem is, here as elsewhere, beset by many obscuring elements. 
Language, at best, yields only remote analogies; and thus far American archeology, 
- though studied with unflagging zeal, has been able to render very partial aid. 
It cannot admit of question that the compass of Canadian, and even of American 
archzeology,—including that of the semi-civilized and lettered races of central and southern 
America,—is greatly circumscribed in comparison with that of Europe. But the simplicity 
which results from this has some compensating elements, in its direct adaptation to the 
study of man, as he appears on this continent unaffected by the artificialities of a forced 
civilization ; and with so little that can lend countenance to any theory of degeneracy from 
a higher condition of life. In the modern alliance between archeology and geology ; and 
the novel views which have resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures 
of primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have givena significance to familiar 
phases of savage life undreamt of till very recently. The student who has by such means 
formed a definite conception of primeval art, and realized some idea of the condition and 
acquirements of the savage of Europe’s postpliocene era, turns with renewed interest to 
living races seemingly perpetuating in arts and habits of our own day what gave character 
to the social life of the prehistoric dawn. This phase of primitive art can still be studied 
on more than one continent ; and in many an island of the Pacific and the Indian ocean ; 
but no where is the apparent reproduction of such initial phases of the history of our race 
presented in so comprehensive an aspect as on this continent. Here are to be found tribes 
in no degree superior in arts or habits to the Australian sayage: while evidence of ingeni- 
ous skill and considerable artistic taste occur among nomads exposed to the extremest pri- 
vations of an Arctic climate, and with no more knowledge of metallurgy than is implied in 
occasionally turning to account the malleable native copper, by hammering it into the 
desired shape ; or, in their intercourse with Arctic voyagers and the Hudson’s Bay trappers, 
acquiring by barter some few implements and weapons of European manufacture. The arts 
of the patient Eskimo, exercised under the stimulus of their constant struggle for existence 
amid all the hardships of a polar climate, have, indeed, not only suggested comparisons 
between them and the artistic cave-dwellers of central Europe in its prehistoric dawn ; but 
have been assumed to prove an ethnical affinity, and direct descent, altogether startling 
when we fully realize the remote antiquity thereby ascribed to the nomads of our own 
northern frontier, and the unchanging condition ascribed to them through all the inter- 
vening ages of geographical and social revolution. 
But whatever may be the value ultimately assigned to this Eskimo pedigree: a like 
phenomenon of unprogressive humanity, perpetuating through countless generations the 
same rudimentary arts, everywhere meets us here ; and seems to me toconstitute the really 
remarkable feature in Canadian and North American archeology. We find, not only in 
Canada but throughout the whole region northward from the Gulf of Mexico, diversified 
illustrations of savage life; but nearly all of them unaffected by traces of contact with earlier 
civilization. From the Arctic frontiers of our Canadian domain the explorer may travel through 
widely diversified regions till he reaches the canons of Mexico, and the ruined cities of Central 
America; and all that he finds of race and art, of language ,or native tradition, is in 
striking contrast to the diversities of the European record of manifold successions of races 
and of arts. Here within the Arctic circle the Eskimo constructs his lodge of snow, and 
