Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/335

Rh were Aryans, and in treating; the Americans as one race it is not intended that they are more closely allied than the different Aryan people of Europe and Asia. The best argument that can be used for the unity of the American race—using the word in a broad sense—is the great difficulty of forming any natural divisions founded upon physical characters. The important character of the hair does not differ throughout the whole continent. It is always straight and lank, long and abundant on the scalp, but sparse elsewhere. The color of the skin is practically uniform, notwithstanding the enormous differences of climate under which many members of the group exist. In the features and cranium certain special modifications prevail in different districts, but the same forms appear at widely separated parts of the continent. I have examined skulls from Vancouver's Island, from Peru, and from Patagonia, which were almost undistinguishable from one another.

Naturalists who have admitted but four primary types of the human species have always found a difficulty with the Americans, hesitating between placing them with the Mongolian or so-called "yellow" races, or elevating them to the rank of a primary group. Cuvier does not seem to have been able to settle this point to his own satisfaction, and leaves it an open question. Although the large majority of Americans have in the special form of the nasal bones, leading to the characteristic high bridge of the nose of the living face, in the well-developed superciliary ridge and retreating forehead, characters which distinguish them from the typical Asiatic Mongol, in so many other respects they resemble them so much that, although admitting the difficulties of the case, I am inclined to include them as aberrant members of the Mongolian type. It is, however, quite open to any one adopting the Negro, Mongolian, and Caucasian as primary divisions, also placing the Americans apart as a fourth.

Now that the high antiquity of man in America, perhaps as high as that he has in Europe, has been discovered, the puzzling problem, from which part of the Old World the people of America have sprung, has lost its significance. It is quite as likely that the people of Asia may have been derived from America as the reverse. However this may be, the population of America had been, before the time of Columbus, practically isolated from the rest of the world, except at the extreme north. Such visits as those of the early Norsemen to the coasts of Greenland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia, or the possible accidental stranding of a canoe containing survivors of a voyage across the Pacific or the Atlantic, can have had no appreciable effect upon the characteristics of the people. It is difficult, therefore, to look upon the anomalous and special characters of the American people as the effects of crossing, as was suggested in the case of the Australians, a consideration which gives more weight to the view of treating them as a distinct primary division.