181 



XII. On the Peopling of America 



liY AUG. R. GKOTE. 



[Read before this Society, February 2, 1877.] 



The conclusion was first reached by myself in a paper ^ read 

 before tlie American Association, August, 1875 (since reprinted in 

 several journals), that we should find colonies of Arctic man upon 

 mountains in the Temperate Zone of North America had all the con- 

 ditions for his survival on these elevations been fulfilled in his case 

 as they have been in that of certain plants and animals. That the 

 Eskimos are the existing representatives of the man of the Ameri- 

 can glacial epoch, just as the White Mountain Butterfly (Oeneis 

 semidea) is the living representative of a colony of the genus 

 planted on the retiring of the ice from tlie valley of the White 

 Mountains, seemed to me at that time a natural conclusion. In a sub- 

 sequent paper,2 Dr, C. C. Abbott, basing his remarks on paleolithic 

 implements discovered by himself in New Jersey, says: "It is fair 

 to presume that the first human beings that dwelt along the shores 

 of the Delaware were really the same people as the present inhabi- 

 tants of Arctic America." The title of Dr. Abbott's paper is 

 ••'Traces of an American Autochthon,"' and in it he institutes 

 a comparison of the paleolithic implements of Xew Jersey with 

 those of Southern France. According to a foot-note of Dr. 

 Abbott's it appears that in 1875 Dr. Eink^ was "strongly of opin- 

 ion that the Eskimo are an indigenous American 2)eople, who have 

 been pushed northwards by the intrusive Indian tribes." A note 

 of mine in objection to the idea that paleolithic man in North 

 America is an " autochthon," will be found in the Am. Nat. for 

 July, 1876, p. 432. 



1 Effect of the Glacial Epoch upon the distribution of lusects in North America, Proc. Am. 

 Ass. Adv. Sci., Detroit Meeting, B. Natural History, 225. 



2 Am. Nat., June, 1876, 329. 



^ Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, London, 1875. 



