750 THE GEOEGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



encroachments of civilization upon them, forcing fchem from their hunting-grounds, 

 and consequently driving them to the west, towards the " setting sun." 



Some of their various theories of their creation will be given, but science demands 

 some better solution of questions so impoitant. And if with that view the suggestions 

 hereafter to be made should fail to settle those important facts, they will, like other 

 theories that have been abundantly advanced, tend towards an ultimate solution of 

 questions which science as yet is a great way from having determined. 



Various theories have been advanced, and by very eminent men, as to the origin of 

 the American Indians, who were found, on the first discovery of the American conti- 

 nent, to be inhabiting every part of it from pole to pole, and every island contiguous 

 to it in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 



These facts put the question at once — " From whence did these people come ? and 

 by what means and by what route did they come ?" These questions are based upon 

 an established presumption of necessity (which may yet be questioned), and ethnolo- 

 gists and geographers have indicated Behriug's Strait, and other points as the proba- 

 ble routes by which they arrived from the '• Old World." All have suggested routes 

 and modes by which it was j)ossibIe they could have come, and their theories there 

 all stand on the slender ground that not one of them has produced a particle of proof 

 that they did come, or that it was necessary that they should have come. 



When the science of human ethnology, which has been for some thousands of years 

 traveling to the west with the advance of civilization, gets quite around the globe, it 

 will probably be seen whether there has not been some error at its starting-point — 

 error as its basis, and, consequently, error heaped upon error as it has advanced. 

 Whether erroneous dogmas, traveling with the wave of civilization, have not been too 

 much the established rule by which all things ethnological in the New World should 

 be measured ; and whether true ethnological knowledge of a people is best drawn 

 from an independent study of those people and their habits, or from the application 

 of an ethnological education drawn from books, made from books, with all the dog- 

 matical rules that have been made for, and applied to, other peoples? 



Is it necessary that on the last quarter of the globe a whole continent of human 

 beings, independent, and happy in their peculiar modes of life, and never heard of or 

 thought of until the fourteenth century, should be traced when discovered, back to 

 the opposite side of the globe, because civilization happened to come from there ? 

 What an ill conceit of civilized man to believe that because his ancestors came from 

 tl^e east, all mankind on a new continent, a new world, must have come from there 

 also ! And what a pity for science, and what a blunder in science, if such a fact be 

 established before it is proved; and what proof of it is there? I have said, "None 

 whatever." 



Ethnologists and other savants find amongst the American Indians some resem- 

 blances in physiological traits to some foreign races. How strange if there were not 

 such ! Once in a while, a word in their language resembles a word in the Hebrew or 

 other eastern language. How extraordinary if in any two languages there were not 

 some words bearing a resemblance to each other ! And then these savants say, " Not 

 only in the resemblance of language, but in the structure of language." But how 

 trivial is all such evidence as this, when all languages are constructed to suit the 

 organs pronouncing them, and which are the same in all the human race, leaving us 

 to wonder that the resemblance in the construction of languages is not greater than 

 it is. 



One distinguished ethnologist of England recites in his work on Ethnology one 

 word of only two syllables, found in use amongst an American tribe on the Pacific 

 coast, the same as spoken by a tribe on the opposite coast of Siberia, as an evidence 

 that the American tribe came from that coast, probably by theway of Behring's Strait. 



What a monstrous way to prove a theory, and how bad the theory that grasps at 

 such proofs! If such an isolated word was worth a notice, why not better suppose 

 that probably some poor fisherman of Siberia had been driven in his canoe to the 



