EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



theories of the recent colonization of America 

 by Kamtchatkans, or Chinamen, or the ten 

 tribes of Israel, are superseded and laid on the 

 shelf. That recent migrations may have occurred 

 is quite another affair. Theories like those of 

 Brasseur de Bourbourg are still to be treated on 

 their own merits, independently of general con- 

 siderations. But one now perceives, in reading 

 them, that they were dictated by a kind of 

 speculative necessity which we no longer feel, 

 because our whole point of view has been shifted. 

 In similar wise have fared the innumerable 

 plans which formerly occupied the attention of 

 scholars for colonizing the whole world from the 

 highlands of Armenia. The ethnological infor- 

 mation contained in the Book of Genesis is of 

 great interest and value, but so far from relating 

 to the whole human race, it totally ignores the 

 larger part of the world, and is concerned only 

 with the peoples of which an inhabitant of Syria 

 might be expected to know something. Long 

 before any possible date for the diffusion from 

 Armenia there described, we know that popu- 

 lous and stationary communities flourished on 

 the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates ; while 

 savage or barbarous tribes, using stone hatchets 

 and flint-headed arrows, wandered through the 

 primeval forests of Europe and America. Ar- 

 menia retains its interest, to some extent, as a 

 possible starting-point, but only in connection 

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