SECT. IV.] THEORY OF AGASSIZ. 199 



The north-polar nations have frequently been considered 

 as a distinct race. This can, however, only be maintained when 

 we simply keep in view their corporeal shape, and the peculiari- 

 ties of their habits and customs. Forster has already, in his 



History of the Voyages to North America," 1 shown the im- 

 )ropriety of grouping together the Lapp and Samoied, and 

 considering them of the same stock as the Esquimaux. As 

 there is even now a large group of Samoied peoples in the 

 south, extending to the sources of the Jenissei, their undoubted 

 affinity to other Asiatic nations, decidedly indicates their origin 

 from central Asia. Who, moreover, could assume that they 

 sprung up in their cold climate, unless the Creator had gifted 

 them with thick fur, like the ice-bear, that they might not be 

 frozen to death before they had learned to build huts, etc. ? 



If it be objected that the climate of the polar regions had 

 been warmer in former periods, there must be assumed a gra- 

 dual acclimatization, which is denied by all those who, like 

 Agassiz, believe that the chief types of mankind are limited 

 to the climatic conditions and zones in which they were born. 

 The polar nations thus manifestly do not originally belong to 

 their present localities. 



This may also, on historical and linguistic grounds, be 

 proved with regard to the Indo-Germanic nations of Europe. 

 They have not sprung up in their present localities, but are 

 immigrants from the south-west of Asia. If the Mongols, 

 Tunguses, and their allied tribes, are considered as a family, 

 the original cradle of which was in the temperate region of 

 Asia, their province now extends, in the south, to the sources 

 of the two large Chinese rivers, and in the north, to the Polar 

 Sea. Where, then, is that climatic limitation of individual 

 human species ? Where is it in America, the separation of 

 which, in three divisions, according to the zones, is ethnogra- 

 phically perfectly arbitrary ? Further, New Holland and Van 

 Diemen's Land are not connected, anthropologically considered, 

 and the province of the south pole is uninhabited. To this 

 must be added, that the Austral-Negroes and Papuas live in 



1 Vol. iii, p. GO, Berlin, 1791. 



