334 THE AMEEICAN MIGEATION. 



Assyriaiis, Persians, and Indo-Bactrians, nations which stood otherwise at a 

 similar grade of development, must have operated as an effectual obstruction. 

 Abstracted, however, from all purely cis-atlantic modes of thinking, the culture 

 originally found in America must appear so much the more advanced as we 

 compare it with the grade of development of other people in a state of nature — 

 with that of the present Indians of America, for instance. This is the criterion 

 which should be applied to all relating to the ancient civilization of America, 

 and we shall thus be always justified in speaking of it as surprising in its ad- 

 vancement. 



The people who, in due course of time, set themselves in motion in America, 

 and sought new abodes in a southern direction, had not attained the degree of 

 civilization which the Spanish conquerors marvelled at in the red men who in- 

 habited the land at the epoch of their arrival, and which, notwithstanding, as 

 above stated, fell far behind the ideas of European civilization even then enter- 

 tained. 1 hold it. therefore, as by no means improbable that races, susceptible 

 of improvement and bearing with them the germ of development, did really take 

 part in the great American migration, but must decidedly regard it as an error 

 to believe, as the advocates of the theory of a civilizing immigration do, that 

 civilization was introduced into America simultaneously with the migration. 

 That the course of civilization could not be wholly independent thereof is readily 

 conceived. The event is considerable enough to have exerted in America, as in 

 Asia and Europe, an influence on the development of civilization, the advanced 

 condition of which, however, is very far from being identical with that of the 

 migration. 



To one who contemplates the features of the migration which in our older 

 continent swept like a lava stream, in the fourth and fifth centuries, over Asia 

 and Europe, hurling to the dust the decayed fabric of Eoman domination, the 

 migration of America must, in its whole form and nature, appear highly surpris- 

 ing. Here we deal not, as in Europe, with the relatively short period of some 

 century, during which the different races, rapidly following one another, crowded 

 together upon the same theatre, but, rather, a slow and perhaps intermitting 

 progression, which required for its complete accomplishment a period of at least 

 five or six hundred years. Modern inquiry, to be sure, has taught us that in 

 further Eastern Asia, and many centuries before our chronological era, the stream 

 of migratory tribes set itself in motion, and the attack of the Turkish race of 

 Hiong-Nu on the Uslin, a fair, blue-eyed, perhaps Indd-Germanic people, was 

 the first check to the general movement which propagated itself from the great 

 Chinese wall to the west of Europe. So far, certainly, is a similitude established 

 between the migrations of the two continents, since to a certain point the ad- 

 vance of the Asiatic hordes was very slow, and only in the end, on its arrival at 

 the boundaries of Europe, did it become a precipitate one. But in America it 

 would be unquestionably more correct to consider the migiation of tribes as a 

 shifting of place, for it bore throughout this character. The cu-cumstance that 

 the American movemcint began about the time when the Asiatic-European 

 ended, has led many to infer that it was the latter, which was simply continued 

 into America, and of course coincides with the immigration theory which I have 

 before more particularly spoken of.* 



* The total unacquaintance with a milk diet in the new continent, and the consequent ab- 

 sence of pastoral pursuits, which forms in the Old World the transition between the nomadic 

 hunting tribes and the agricultural populations, (certainly a striking phenomenon,) induced 

 Humboldt to derive the supposed immigrants from those races of Northeastern Asia, of whom 

 we know that the use of milk is to them equally a stranger. (Ans. der Nat , 1, b2, and 

 Vues des Cord., I, 34.) It further follows that he who admits the emigration to have p o- 

 ceeded from the northern regions of America, where climatic influences forbid the rearing 

 of herds, will arrive at the perhaps more correct conclusion ths^t a diet of milk was unknown 

 to the Americans a priori. . Were this not so, the immigrating tribes would very soon have 

 learned from the original inhabitants the use of milk as well as of ihe farinaceous gramiueaj. 



