Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/105



would have been but reasonable to have expected that the opening of an inhabited continent — more than half the land surface of the globe — to the intelligent curiosity of the representatives of the civilization of the Old World, would have contributed largely to the sum and the elements of our knowledge of the origin and history of our human race. Anything that was to be learned of aboriginal life here would have been invaluable to the archæologist, and might have served towards solving the problems yet left unfathomed by all the skill of science and all the monumental relics on the other continents. Whether either of these halves of the globe had originally received its human inhabitants from the other half, or had been stocked each by its independent ancestry, an unknown lapse of ages had transpired without intercourse between them. We might have looked at least for the means of deciding this alternative of unity or diversity in the origin of our race. The means for that decision would have been sought in traditions and tokens of a primitive kinship and history, while any radical and heterogeneous characteristics running through the inhabitants of either half of the globe would have brought their unity of origin under serious question. Regrets have often been expressed that this question was not at once made the subject of keenly intelligent investigation by the first Europeans in their