264 NATURAL HISTORY OP 



after to be mentioned, had no doubt inducements which brought 

 the parent families of the high-nosed and other nations of 

 North America to that continent; and the influence of rigor- 

 ous winter seasons must have gradually induced them to seek 

 milder latitudes, where more plentiful means of subsistence 

 were accessible, in the same manner as the nations of northern 

 Asia and Europe have and ever will continue to do when they 

 have a chance of success. It is perhaps here that we must 

 look for the sources of those multiplied evidences of Asiatic 

 origin, shown by most, if not all, the American tribes, both 

 those of the IMongolic or of the beardless stock, and of the true 

 Caucasian ; for, when the former of these had journeyed almost 

 entirely southward, tribes of the latter appear to have occupied 

 their abandoned localities, and, in a pure condition, or blended 

 with such as remained behind, to have parsed on across the 

 isthmus, or the straits, to the American shore, whither they, in 

 their turn, were followed by the Esquimaux or Skrelings, who, 

 it is evident, came last, since their descendants have never been 

 able to penetrate more to the south than the shores of Nootka. 

 All these occurrences coincide with the known progress of 

 the Caucasian nations to western Asia and to Europe. They 

 account for the presence of similar inscriptions in Siberia and 

 in America, and for many of the facts of the peopling of the 

 new continent at a later period than the west of the Old World ; 

 they admit, without violence, the usual immigrations of dis- 

 tressed marine wanderers, whether they were of Malay or of 

 Phoenician origin, and even of African as well as Oriental 

 Negroes ; such as the colony of the former found at Cariquel, 

 near the Isthmus of Darien, or the now exterminated Char- 

 ruans * of the Guarani, or, like the latter, found in a mixed 

 state on the shores of California. This view gives sufficient 

 time for the local intermixture of the races with the fiat-headed 



* These may be the same Sir Walter Raleigh mentions as having lank 

 hair ia Guiana, where he observed them. 



