Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/169

Rh limit of the Esquimaux. The skrälings who came on the sea in skin canoes (hudhkeipr), and hurled their spears with slings (valslöngva), seem by these very facts to have been probably Esquimaux, and the mention of their being swarthy, with great eyes and broad cheeks, agrees tolerably with this. The statement usually made that the word skräling meant "dwarf" would, if correct, have settled the question; but, unfortunately, there is no real warrant for this etymology. If we may take it that Esquimaux eight hundred years ago, before they had ever found their way to Greenland, were hunting seals on the coast of Newfoundland, and caribou in the forest, their life need not have been very unlike what it is now in their Arctic home. Some day, perhaps, the St. Lawrence and Newfoundland shores will be searched for relics of Esquimau life, as has been done with such success in the Aleutian Islands by Mr. W. H. Dall, though on this side of the continent we can hardly expect to find, as he does, traces of long residence and rise from a still lower condition.

Surveying now the vast series of so-called native, or indigenous, tribes of North and South America, we may admit that the fundamental notion on which American anthropology has to be treated is its relation to Asiatic. This kind of research is, as we know, quite old, but the recent advances of zoölogy and geology have given it new breadth as well as facility. The theories which account for the wide-lying American tribes, disconnected by language as they are, as all descended from ancestors who came by sea in boats, or across Behring Strait on the ice, may be felt somewhat to strain the probabilities of migration, and are likely to be remodeled under the information now supplied by geology as to the distribution of animals. It has become a familiar fact that the Equidæ, or horse-like animals, belong even more remarkably to the New than to the Old World. There was plainly land-connection between America and Asia, for the horses whose remains are fossil in America to have been genetically connected with the horses reintroduced from Europe. The deer may have passed from the Old World into North America in the Pliocene period; and the opinion is strongly held that the camels came the other way, originating in America and spreading thence into Asia and Africa. The mammoth and the reindeer did not cross over a few thousand years ago by Behring Strait, for they had been since Pleistocene times spread over the north of what was then one continent. To realize this ancient land-junction of Asia and America, this "Tertiary bridge," to use Professor Marsh's expression, it is instructive to look at Mr. Wallace's chart of the present soundings, observing that an elevation of under two hundred feet would make Behring Strait land, while moderately shallow sea extends southward to about the line of the Aleutian Islands, below which comes the plunge into the ocean-depths. If, then, we are to consider America as having received its human population by ordinary migration of successive tribes along this