Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/111

Rh the north, and to a passage over a frozen ocean, the opposite shores of Asia must be supposed further to have become densely populated, to make it necessary for any portion of them to go away on any hazardous journey. But even in the present day we cannot find that the extreme north-east shores of Asia are at all so densely populated; and the conclusion altogether, therefore, seems inevitable, that although some portion, and even a large portion, of the American nations might have come across by those straits, yet they were not the ancestors of all the American nations, nor yet of the greater part of them.

The same remarks apply in a great measure to the opinions of the latest writer of eminence on the subject in our day, Dr. Latham, who observes, "I believe that if the Pacific coast of America had been the one first discovered and fullest described, so that Russian America, New Caledonia, Queen Charlotte's Archipelago, and Nutka Sound had been as well known as we know Canada and New Brunswick, there would never have been any doubts or difficulties as to the origin of the so-called Red Indians of the New World, and no one would ever have speculated about Africans finding their way to Brazil, or Polynesians to California. The common sense primâ facie view would have been admitted at once, instead of being partially refined or partially abandoned. North-Eastern Asia would have passed for the fatherland to North-Western America; and instead of Chinese and Japanese characteristics creating wonder when discovered in Mexico and Peru, the only wonder would have been in the rarity of the occurrence. But geographical discovery came from another quarter; and as it was the Indians of the Atlantic whose history first served as food for speculation, the most natural view of the origin of the American population was the last to be adopted, — perhaps it has still to be recognised." ("Man and his Migrations," p. 122.)

From this it appears that the learned writer, giving in his adhesion to the supposition of one only means of arrival of the so-called Red Indians into America equally with Dr. Robertson, would, however, give them a lower range of places of transit of from 10° to 15° further south, even if he does not also allot for them China and Japan as their "fatherland."

On the other hand, another late writer. Dr. Lang, in his "Origin and Migrations of the Polynesians," while falling into the same exclusiveness of ascribing one only source of origin for the American Indians, deduces their migration