472 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



the resulting record with the similar record of the Old World. 

 Naturally the time has not arrived for final conclusions ; but enough 

 facts are available already for what it is hoped may be a helpful 

 preliminary statement. To this end it is the purpose here to sketch 

 briefly the historical development of the problems involved, to pre- 

 sent a summary of the evidence already at hand, and to draw such 

 conclusions as seem warranted. 



HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PROBLEM 

 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGIN 



As has been intimated, the first question which arose with respect 

 to the American Indian concerned his identity or origin. It seems 

 a natural enough question and the only one which at the time could 

 be considered speculatively — that is, without waiting for the tedious 

 accumulation of additional facts. But there was a specific reason 

 why this question arose when it did ; and because this early formula- 

 tion of our problem, with its lengthy treatment, throws a revealing 

 sidelight on the workings of the human mind, brief consideration 

 seems irresistil^le. 



To the pagan and unschooled Norsemen of the year 1000 the 

 trans-Atlantic savages appear to have presented no particular his- 

 torical problems. To the more sophisticated Columbus of 1492 — 

 however puzzled he may have been — these same or similar savages 

 were obviously and necessarily Asiatics or, more precisely, Indians. 

 But this semiempirical view of the great navigator suffered sudden 

 and long eclijDse at the hands of medieval scholarship, whose oppor- 

 tunity came in 1513 when Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean and 

 thereby appeared to demonstrate that the continent reached by Co- 

 lumbus was a New World, and its inhabitants likewise new and in no 

 way accounted for by the ancient authoritative books handed down. 

 The first result was that while the New World v/ith its gold and other 

 riches was accepted as reality, the truly human nature of its inhabi- 

 tants was temporarily held in doubt. But, gradually, there arose a 

 long succession of more or less speculative attempts to link the New 

 World people with one or another of the Old World nations and to 

 account for their presence in America by migrations, necessarily in 

 relatively recent or so-called " historic times." Needless to state, sev- 

 eral of these argumentative demonstrations still have their adherents, 

 and the latest of them — a modernized version of an old theory — traces 

 all that is worth while in native American physique and culture to 

 Egypt. 



Parenthetically, this attitude of mind and general course of 

 thought development may be readily enough understood when we 

 recall that European scholars were steeped in ancient history and 



