THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 751 



Columbia coast, and that the American Indians who x>icked him up adojitcd from him 

 a dying word to recollect him by ? 



As has been said, that I went to Petropotrovski, to the Aleutian Islands, and to 

 Kamskatka, on the coast of Siberia. I found many words of Siberian languages 

 spoken on the American side of the Strait of Behring, and as many, or more, on the 

 Siberian side, of the American languages. What did this prove? Nothing— excei>t 

 that there had been a mutual crossing of Behring's Strait in their canoes or on the ice 

 (both of which at certain seasons are feasible), and that there had been, to a certain 

 extent, a mutual adoption of words in their languages. It proved that those oppo- 

 site people sometimes cross the strait, while the total absence of resemblance in physio- 

 logical traits as positively disprove the fact of emigration (or peopling a continent) 

 from one side or the other. 



The ethnologist enters the wildest tribes on the United States frontier, and to his 

 astonishment finds the Indians there using occasionally French and English words, 

 and now and then meets a half white Indian, with a French face and a French beard. 

 This is no evidence that these tribes are Frenchmen or Englishmen, but proves only 

 that Frenchmen and Englishmen have been there a hundred years before him. 



He finds these people using bows and arrows, the same precisely as were anciently 

 used by the ancient Saxon race, the flint arrow and spear heads precisely the same 

 as those of the ancient Britons, and he is astounded ! but why astonished ? What do 

 these prove ? Not that the American Indians emigrated from the British Isle, or that 

 the ancient Britons came across the Atlantic in their canoes from America, but it 

 helps to prove the truth of the old adage, that " necessity is the mother of inven- 

 tion," that the nations of all the earth, without the use of iron, having necessity for 

 food and means of getting it, and implements for war and defense, have had alike 

 the ingenuity to take the sharp edge of broken flints for knives and arrow-points, 

 and by the aid of their inventive powers, granted them alike by the Great Spirit, 

 they have e-voiywhere improved them much in the same shape, not from each other, 

 but led to the same results and same forms by the peculiar fracture of the stone, in all 

 countries the same, and the similar objects for which their knives and arrow-heads 

 were formed. 



The flint arrow, therefore, and the bow to throw it, have been not necessarily the 

 gift of one nation to another, but the native invention of every people. They 

 certainly came not from Adam. Adam was a gardener, and his sons farmers and tend- 

 ers of flocks. These things, then, were purely of human invention, and growing out 

 of necessity; and if one race invented them, another race, from the same necessity, 

 could as well do it. 



Savants who have grown up ethnologists in their fathers' libraries of books, also 

 tell us that some portions of the splendid ruins at Usmal and Copan, as well as 

 ancient sculpture found in Mexico, and the relics found on the Ohio and Muskingum 

 are of Egyptian origin, because they resemble Egyptian monuments. 



How weak is such evidence, that merely because these ruins and these sculptures 

 happen to resemble some edifices or some sculptures of the Egyjjtiaus, that they are 

 of Egyptian origin! They admit that they were built by savage tribes, for they bear 

 no Egyptian inscriptions or hieroglyphics, but the inscriptions and hieroglyphics of 

 savage races who must have brought their art of building and sculpture from Egypt ! 



How astonishing that such stupendous ruins are actually there, and were built 

 there and left there without a living soul to tell their history or who built them, 

 and covered with inscriptions and hieroglyphics no doubt telling their own history if 

 they could be read, but no corresponding living language in the Old World or the New 

 to prove that their origin was Asiatic or Egyptian. 



Egyptian sculpture and Egyptian architecture were not taught the Egyptians; 

 they were the inventions, and in their grandeur and magnificence were but the prog- 

 ress of native art; and so the ruined temples and palaces of Palenquo and Uxmal. 



Talents for art and design are inherent in al] mankind, and as wealth and luxury 



