ABORIGINAL AMERICANS — HOLMES. 429 
THE AMERICAN RACE. 
In turning our attention to the American race, we study their 
facial characters in search of clues to their origin — their relationship 
with and their derivation from the complex of known peoples of the 
Old World. It is generally conceded that the red race is a new race as 
compared with the great races of the Old World. There have been 
found in America, after prolonged research, no certain traces of occu- 
pation extending back beyond a few thousand years ; whereas, in the 
Old World there are abundant traces of human occupation whose age 
must be reckoned not in thousands, but in tens of thousands of years. 
The earliest skeletal remains in the New World are of men represent- 
ing the perfected stage of physical development, the crania corre- 
sponding closely with those of civilized man; whereas, in the Old 
World the earliest finds are of forms hardly differentiated from the 
status of the higher apes. 
It is not assumed that the pioneers of the Old World, who in fol- 
lowing the tendency to wander reached the shores of Bering Sea, 
arrived in large numbers — that there was anything that could be 
called a migration, but that stragglers from Asiatic centers of popu- 
lation found their way across the intervening waters to the shores 
of America; and the process, continuing from century to century, 
involved not a single people nor a few more or less fully differentiated 
groups, but representatives of many of the brown-skinned peoples 
of the Asiatic shore land and of the islands of the Pacific and 
Indian Oceans. That some such process was involved is assumed 
from the fact that the American race to-day does not, as a whole, 
distinctly duplicate any known type of the Oriental groups, its 
homogenous character being due doubtless to a long period of race 
isolation, the diversified elements thus becoming blended into a new 
and distinctive people. It is probable that this condition was 
brought about or greatly accelerated by the eastern progress of the 
northern Asiatics, who for an indefinite period have occupied the 
shores of Bering Strait and Sea, blocking the way to the more 
southern groups. 
FACIAL CHARACTERS AS A KEY TO ORIGIN. 
Although there has been more or less blending of the Eskimo and 
the Indian along the line of contact from Alaska to Greenland, the 
two races in their totality stand well apart. The very pronounced 
gulf between them is well shown by comparison of the typical Indian 
of the northern interior (pi. 1, fig. 1, and pi. 2, fig. 1) with the typical 
Eskimo (pi. 1, fig. 2, and pi, 2, fig. 2) , the latter type being character- 
ized by the broad face and tilted eyes of the Mongol. The Indian, 
whose bold features stamp him as one of the ablest of the races. 
