112 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA 
How came the Chinese—a people so ancient, so reserved, and so wholly 
unlike their surrounding neighbors, or indeed any other race upon the conti- 
nent of Asia—to be thus alone in this corner of a continent, walled in apart 
from all neighboring races? We may reasonably doubt the assumption of 
any spontaneous growth in the country they now inhabit. Conjectured 
migrations among still speechless societies, at an epoch anterior to the forma- 
tion of nations, are beyond our present ability to trace. We can only surmise 
whether each continent evolved a type of manhood separately, or whether all 
higher races have resulted from the various differentiations and dispersions 
from asingle locality, of a common ancestor already developed up to the 
lowest types of a speechless animal, tending to manhood. 
Our best researches indicate an enormous antiquity for man on the Ameri- 
can continent, and an advance in general form and brain capacity, with, 
doubtless, a modification of color, since a very early period. In very remote 
times, there appears to have existed at least two very distinct populations, 
differing, in fact, more widely than any existing aborigines of the continent. 
Portions of North America had been occupied by races far more advanced 
than its occupants when recently discovered by Europeans. Originating, 
perhaps, at a very early period in the elevated centres of the American conti- 
nent, wave after wave of races may have rolled eastward and westward, or 
northward and southward, to a certain extent, only identified in America 
to-day by slight signs that mark the nearly extinct descendants of the people 
with which they amalgamated. 
Dogmatic theology retreats before scientific truth. No one will, at this day, 
pronounce the self-registering records of nature grave heresies. They are 
vastly more enduring, authentic and reliable testimony than the precarious 
text of human narrators. It seems a crime against true religion to hang the 
integrity of its moral principles upon the validity of statistics in any book 
which merely illustrates, by historical parables, the early development of its 
traditional ideas. The innate virtue of its pure principles is unharmed by 
legendary or dogmatic absurdities. 
The Chinese have an immense antiquity. They are a peculiar people, very 
marked in their features, and have multiplied so that at present their popula- 
tion and area of production are so balanced that any marked increase would 
precipitate a famine, and thus equalize conditions. They not only practice 
economy, but enjoy it, having learned in centuries to live upon the minimum 
and enjoy the maximum of life. 
All other civilizations and emigrations throughout Asia appear to have 
moved from Asia Minor, and the high central portions of the North and 
West. The Chinese appear as an isolated people, and have long preserved 
the peculiar type of a race wholly unlike any other on the continent of Asia. 
Their country is situated upon the south-eastern extremity of the continent, 
and hemmed in on the west and north by a chain of mountains practically 
impassable, and now made more so by the great wall, 1,250 miles in length, 
with which, B. C. 220, they sought to complete their isolation. 
If this people did not develop from the soil they now occupy, we must 
search for the most probable mode of access by which their earliest ancestry 
reached their present home. In this stage of the world, all nations are more 
or less composite. 
