THE ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN RACES.* 



Iiv Hts Honour Mr. Justice Russell, LL.B., Trinidad. 



The problem of the origin of the American races may be regarded 

 as one which is common to two sciences — anthropology and ethnology. 

 Anthropology, with its measurements of skulls and thigh bones and such 

 like, is comparatively a dry study ; and you will be relieved to hear that 

 I propose carefully to avoid it in this brief paper. But ethnology is a 

 tiowery field, practically unbounded in its expanse,, in which the un- 

 learned may roam at will, culling what blooms strike his fancy and 

 arranging them in the most fantastic wreaths to deck his own brow, if 

 he be an egotistical fellow, or those of some particular stock or tribe 

 which he may select for special glorification to the exclusion of the 

 remainder of humanity : a thing which, as I shall endeavour to show, a 

 good many writers on such subjects have done. Ethnology, at its 

 present stage, is not an exact science. The multifariousness as its data 

 and their uncertainty make it easy for the amateur scientist to imagine 

 himself a discoverer, and, by judiciously picking out what suits his pur- 

 pose and ignoring the rest, to reconstruct whole aeons of the past with 

 as peifect an insouciance as a child builds palaces of sticks and straws. 

 Given leisure and industry, he may advance still further and 

 convince others, making them too to see the product of his imaginings : 

 shadowy worlds which were or may have been ; marvels and 

 cataclysms : heat and cold, earth and water contending for supre- 

 macy : continents submerged ; seas changed to deserts ; with hordes of 

 primitive humanity (like busy ants) threading the changing maze of land 

 and sea, mountains and plains, here engulfed by thousands, nay, by 

 millions, musterino- elsewhere, mm£"lino; interchano-ino- laiiguasres, cus- 

 toms, religions : until — -behold them emerging in the dawning light of 

 history ! How curious ! How interesting ! But is it science ? Well, 

 who knows? Only by much guessing has man ever attained to know- 

 ledge : imagination is the real novum organum, inspiring now a Coper- 

 nicus, now a Galileo, now a Newton, with glimpses of truth once seem- 

 ingly incredible, onty to be brought to a certainty by centuries of veri- 

 fication. Will a time come when the ethnologists theories will be 

 similarly established ? Will some master of many sciences, versed in 

 anthropology, philology, geology, history, mythology, folk-lore, com- 

 parative religion and the innumerable branches of inquiry which have- 

 already shed, or may hereafter shed a light upon the problem, capable of 

 discerning what is certain in each, what is worthy of provisional 

 credence, what is worthless and deserving to be wholly rejected, and 

 endowed with ingenuity and energy sufficient to weld the whole mass 

 into one, and construct a chain of circumstantial evidence, irrefragable 



* A Lecture delivered at the Royal Victoria Institute, Port-of-Spain. Trinidad, 

 on the 17th March, 1914. 



