30 
EEYIEWS. 
“ so strongly defined a character as are tlins shown to exist between 
“ various ancient and modern people of America, amount to no more 
“ than variations within the normal range of the common type, then 
“ all the important distinctions between the crania of ancient European 
“ barrows and those of living races, amount to little; and the more 
“ delicate details . . . must be utterly valueless.” The habit of bury¬ 
ing the corpse in a sitting posture was also relied upon by Dr. Morton 
as an additional evidence of the unity of race in the American nations, 
but we quite agree with Dr. Wilson in attributing little value to this 
argument; it having been already shown in the columns of this Review 
that the habit in question was common to many ancient nations, and 
the most remote countries. 
With reference to the source or sources of the American 
population, Dr. Wilson seems rather to incline towards a Poly¬ 
nesian origin, for though he admits that “ many analogies confirm 
“ the probability of some portion of the North American stock 
“ having entered the Continent from Asia,” still, if we have not mis¬ 
understood his meaning, he considers that “ while, theoretically, the 
“ northern passage seems so easy, yet so far as any direct proof goes, 
• c the Polynesian entrance into the South, across the wide barrier of 
“ the Pacific, is the one most readily sustained.” 
He must forgive us for quarrelling with his last chapter, entitled 
“ Guesses at the Age of Man.” “To those,” indeed, he says, “who 
“ can accept of (sic) a theory which would make man the mere latest 
“ development of the same life-germ out of which all organic being 
“ has been evolved by a process of natural selection, it is as difficult 
“ to place limits to his possible existence, as to determine where the 
“ ape or the faun ended and man began. But to those who still 
“ believe that God made man ‘ in his own image,’ the limits which 
“ must be assigned to the existence of the race lie within moderate, 
“ if undefined bounds.” 
We do not perceive the force of the argument, that moderate 
limits “ must be assigned to the existence of the race,” because “ God 
made man in his own image nor can we too strongly reprobate the 
attempt to fix a stigma of irreligion on the theory of Natural 
Selection. 
As far as science is concerned, his reason for this conclusion ap¬ 
pears to be that history carries us back, in his opinion, to the infancy 
of human thought, so “ that we seem to stand in need of no great 
“ lapse of centuries between that and the beginning of man himself.” 
We have not space to examine this reasoning, but must content our¬ 
selves with the simple statement. Our surprise at the result ceases 
when we discover that, in Dr. Wilson’s opinion, the date of our 
creation has been revealed to us, but it is replaced by astonishment 
that, under these circumstances, he should still regard the Age of 
Man as a fit subject for “ G-uesses.” 
