408 SOME ETHNOGRAPHIC PHASES OF CONCHOLOGY. 



mercliantmen of Asia, that the north of Europe exchanged its mineral 

 treasures for the coveted possessions of regions lying towards the 

 tropics. Herodotus, in the earliest known reference to the British 

 Isles as the source of tin, refers to them only to declare his total 

 ignorance of them ; and in noticing the rumour that amber is brought 

 from the northern sea in which they lie, he says : — " I am not able, 

 though paying much attention to the subject, to hear of any one that 

 has been an eye witness that a sea exists on that side of Europe." 

 Nor did this singular isolation, so peculiarly characteristic of Europe, 

 disappear even in the later ages of Roman rule. Dr. Arnold, in con- 

 trasting our knowledge of the globe with the ignorance of earlier 

 ages, remarks : " The Roman colonies along the Rhine and the Danube 

 looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the 

 stars, and actually see with our eyes worlds of which we know 

 nothing." 



The Indian relics now specially referred to, when considered in 

 connexion with the copper weapons, implements and ornaments of 

 Southern grave-mounds, appear to throw a light on the past history 

 of the American continent in its antehistoric ages, and to show it then 

 as now, as clearly distinct in political as in physical characteristics 

 from ancient or modern Europe. Europe never could be for any 

 length of time the area for a nomadic population. In America, with 

 its great unbroken levels, even the home-loving Anglo-Saxon becomes 

 migratory, and seems to lose in a degree his old characteristic of local 

 attachment. In Europe the diverse ethnological elements are still 

 kept apart by its physical features. The Iberian of Ante-Christian 

 centuries survives in the Pyrenees, and the Gaul and Briton of the 

 first century find still their representatives on the coasts of Brit- 

 tany, and in the mountains of Wales. But an aboriginal population, 

 marked by many nearly homogeneous characteristics, appears to have 

 occupied the entire area of the American continent ; and now when 

 its ancient tribes are being displaced by the colonists that Spain, 

 England and Ireland, France, Italy and Germany, Poland and Hun- 

 gary, pour unceasingly on its shores : the distinctions of Iberian, 

 German, Celt and Saxon, which have survived there for well nigh two 

 thousand years, appear to vanish almost with the generation that sets 

 foot on the shores of the new world. "When we consider how largely 

 all European history has been affected by the peninsular character of 

 Greece and Italy, and by the insular character of Britain, as well as 



