Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/118

106 extinct having formerly existed in America, not only from the works and remains of ancient skill and labour, but also from the shape of the skulls sometimes found there, supposed to be of a different conformation from that of any people now existing. The former ground of opinion, founded on a supposed unascertainable antiquity of the remains of handiwork, I trust I have already sufficiently answered. The latter, arising from the different shape of skulls, appears to me susceptible of the same answer, though, as an unprofessional dissentient, I feel more hesitation in disputing the theory. Still, when I look around in vain for any well recognised bodily representatives of Greek or Roman skulls, nay, of our own island races of more than a thousand years back, and doubting the preservation of the bones of any beyond that period without artificial means being adopted, I cannot attach any value to the deductions formed from a few crania, whose history is all founded on conjecture, and which may have been only those of some barbarous people who had some peculiar fancy for distorting the head, as many savage tribes are known to have done in later times. If any people had ever existed in America of a different conformation to the rest of mankind, within the limits of time during which their crania could have escaped the law of returning to the dust from which they were formed, we cannot suppose they could have become utterly exterminated, so as to leave no representative of their species within the limits prescribed to history, especially if they were the builders of such works as yet remain in Peru, Mexico, and Central America, or even of the mighty mounds of the valley of the Mississippi.

Turning, then, from the insubstantialities of hypothesis to the realities of facts, without attempting to enter into minute particularities, we may observe, with regard to North America, that there seem to have been two great divisions of people among the Indians inhabiting the eastern and western countries of that continent. They both bore the general colour and appearance of the Mongol, or Asiatic race, but those on the west alone had the obliquity of eye peculiar to the Mongolians, that peculiarity extending down to Mexico, Central America, and still further south, evidencing their origin from the Mongols of the north-west of Asia. In the eastern countries of North America this strongly-marked peculiarity was not found, as Dr. Morton has also stated in his great work, "Crania Americana;" while the Indians there were distinguishable by manners equally indicative of their distinct origin. With respect to these I do not wish to strain