40 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
things when the world beyond the Alps was a mystery to the Greek historian, and the 
very existence of the river Rhine was questioned; or when, four centuries later, the 
nations around the Baltic, which were before long to supplant the masters of the Roman 
world, were so entirely unknown to them that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, in one-of his letters : 
“The Roman colonies along the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond 
those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our own eyes a world of which 
we know nothing.” Yet such ignorance was not incompatible with indirect intercourse, 
and was so far from excluding the barbarians beyond the Alps or the Baltic from all the fruits 
of the civilization which grew up around the Mediterranean Nea, that the study of European 
archeology has owed its chief impediment to the difficulty of discriminating between 
arts of diverse eras and races of northern Europe, intermingled with those of its Neolithic 
and Bronze periods ; or of separating them from the true products of Celtic and classic 
workmanship. 
It is altogether differont with American archeology. Were there any traces here of 
Celtic, Roman, or mediæval European art, the whole tendency of the American mind 
would be to give even an exaggerated value to their influence. Superficial students of the 
ruins of Mexico and Central America have misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to what 
may not inaptly be designated instincts common to the human mind in its first efforts at 
visible expression of its ideas ; and have recognized in them fancied analogies with ancient 
Egyptian art, or with the mythology and astronomical science of the East. Had, indeed, 
the more advanced nations of the New World borrowed the arts of Egypt, India, or 
Greece: the great river highways, and the vast unbroken levels of the northern continent 
presented abundant facilities for their diffusion, with no greater aid than the birch-bark 
canoe of the northern savage. The copper of Lake Superior was familiar to nations on the 
banks of the Mississippi, che St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware. Nor was the 
influence of southern civilization wholly inoperative. Reflex traces of the prolific fancy of 
the Peruvian potter may be detected in the rude ware of the mounds of Georgia and Ten- 
nessee; and the conventional art of Yucatan reappears in the ornamentation of the lodges 
of the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte’s Islands, and in the wood and iyory carvings of the 
Tawatin and other tribes of British Columbia. Already, moreoyer, the elaborate native 
devices which give such distinctive character to the ivory and claystone carvings of the 
Chimpseyan and Clalam Indians, have been largely superseded by reproductions of Euro- 
pean ornamentation, or literal representations of houses, shipping, horses, fire-arms, and 
other objects brought under the notice of the native artist in his intercourse with white 
men. We are justified, therefore, in assuming that no long-matured civilization could 
have existed in any part of the American continent without leaving, not only abundant 
evidence of its presence within its own area, but also many traces of its influence far 
beyond. Yet it cannot be said of the vanished races of the North American continent 
that they died and made no sign. Their memorials are abundant, and some of their 
earthworks and burial mounds are on a gigantic scale. But they perpetuate no 
evidence of a native civilisation of elder times bearing the slightest analogy to that of 
Europe through all its historic centuries. The western hemisphere stands a world 
apart, with languages and customs essentially its own; and with man and his arts 
embraced within greatly narrower limits of development than in any other quarter of the 
globe. The evolutionist may, indeed, be tempted by the absence not only of the anthro- 
