still room for speculation. Opinion seems, however t to be 
settling lown to the view that the American race, as it stands 
today, is not autochthonous but is an offshoot of Asiatic 
peoples more or less diverse in character originally and arriv- 
ing in America, mainly at least, by the Bering strait route and 
this not abruptly but in the normal course of race distribu- 
tion from the natal habitat, and in time extending over untold 
centuries. Americanists have here a difficult, a perplexing, 
but a most fascinating field cf research. 
Today one of the moat absorbing questions encountered 
by the student of American archeology is that of the origin 
of the aboriginal cultures . Some regard these cultures as 
autochthonous, others nave looked for their source in many 
different parts of the world. Although as yet no final conclu- 
sion can be announced we may assume that along with -the in- 
coming peoples, all or most of whom must have been extremely 
primitive dwellers of the far north, there came the simplest 
