Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/170

158, the importance is obvious of deciding how old man is in America, and how long the continent remained united with Asia, as well as how these two difficult questions are bound up together in their bearing on anthropology. Leaving them to be settled by more competent judges, I will only point out that the theory of northern migration on dry land is, after all, only a revival of an old opinion, which came naturally to Acosta in the sixteenth century, because Behring Strait was not yet known of, and was held by Buffon in the eighteenth because the zoölogical conditions compelled him to suppose that Behring Strait had not always been there. Such a theory, whatever the exact shape it may take, seems wanted for the explanation of that most obvious fact of anthropology, the analogy of the indigenes of America with Asiatics, and more specifically with East and North Asiatics or Mongoloids. This broad race-generalization has thrust itself on every observer, and each has an instance to mention. My own particular instance is derived from inspection of a party of Botocudo Indians lately exhibited in London, who in proper clothing could have passed without question as Thibetans or Siamese. Now, when ethnologists like Dr. Pickering remark on the South Asiatic appearance of Californian tribes, it is open to them to argue that Japanese sailors of junks wrecked on the coast may have founded families there. But the Botocudos are far south and on the other side of the Andes, rude dwellers in the forests of Brazil, and yet they exhibit in an extreme form the Mongoloid character which makes America to the anthropologist part and parcel of Asia. Looked at in this light, there is something suggestive in our still giving to the natives of America the name of Indians; the idea of Columbus that the Caribs were Asiatics was not so absurd, after all.

It is perhaps hardly needful now to protest against stretching the generalization of American uniformity too far, and taking literally Humboldt's saying that he who has seen one American has seen all. The common character of American tribes, from Hudson's Bay to Tierra del Fuego, though more homogeneous than on any other tract of the world of similar extent, admits of wide sub-variation. How to distinguish and measure this sub-variation is a problem in which anthropology has only reached unsatisfactory results. The broad distinctions which are plainly seen are also those which are readily defined, such as the shape of the nose, curve of the lips, or the projection of the cheek-bones. But all who have compared such American races as Aztecs and Ojibways must be sensible of extreme difficulty in measuring the proportions of an average facial type. The attempt to give in a single pair of portraits a generalized national type has been tried—for instance, in the St. Petersburg set of models of races at the Exhibition of 1862. But done merely by eye, as they were, they were not so good as well-chosen individual portraits. It would be most desirable that Mr. Francis Galton's method of photographs, superposed