THE PROGRESS OF OPINION RESPECTING THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA.

BY THE EDITOR.

THE literature respecting the origin and early condition of the American aborigines is very extensive; and, as a rule, especially in the earlier period, it is not characterized by much reserve in connecting races by historical analogies.[1566] Few before Dr. Robertson, in discussing the problem, could say: “I have ventured to inquire without presuming to decide.”

The question was one that allured many of the earlier Spanish writers like Herrera and Torquemada. Among the earlier English discussions is that of Wm. Bourne in his Booke called the Treasure for Travellers (London, 1578), where a section is given to “The Peopling of America.” The most famous of the early discussions of the various theories was that of Gregorio Garciá, a missionary for twenty years in South America, who reviewed the question in his Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo (Valencia, 1607).[1567] He goes over the supposed navigations of the Phœnicians, the identity of Peru with Solomon’s Ophir, and the chances of African, Roman, and Jewish migrations,—only to reject them all, and to favor a coming of Tartars and Chinese. Clavigero thinks his evidences the merest conjectures. E. Brerewood, in his Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions (London, 1632, 1635), claimed a Tartar origin. In New England, where many were believers in the Jewish analogies, it is somewhat amusing to find not long after this the quizzical Thomas Morton, with what seems like mock gravity, finding the aboriginal source in “the scattered Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”[1568] The reader, however, is referred to other sections of the present volume for the literature bearing upon the distinct ethnical connections of the early American peoples.

The chief literary controversy over the question began in 1642, when Hugo Grotius published his De Origine Gentium Americanarum Dissertatio (Paris and Amsterdam, 1642).[1569] He argued that all North America except Yucatan (which had an Ethiopian stock) was peopled from the Scandinavian North; that the Peruvians were from China, and that the Moluccans peopled the regions below Peru. Grotius aroused an antagonist in Johannes de Laet, whose challenge appeared the next year: Joannis de Laet Antwerpiani notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii de origine gentium Americanarum: et observationes aliquot ad meliorem indaginem difficillimæ illius quæstionis (Amsterdam, 1643).[1570] He combated his brother Dutchman at all points, and contended that the Scythian race furnished the predominant population of America. The Spaniards went to the Canaries, and thence some of their vessels drifted to Brazil. He is inclined to accept the story of Madoc’s Welshmen, and think it not unlikely that the people of the Pacific islands may have floated to the western coast of South America, and that minor migrations may have come from other lands. He supports his views by comparisons of the Irish, Gallic, Icelandic, Huron, Iroquois, and Mexican tongues.

To all this Grotius replied in a second Dissertatio, and De Laet again renewed the attack: Ioannis de Laet Antwerpiani responsio ad dissertationem secundam Hvgonis Grotii, de origine gentium Americanarum. Cum indice ad utrumque libellum (Amsterdam, 1644).[1571]

De Laet, not content with his own onset, incited another to take part in the controversy, and so George Horn (Hornius) published his De Originibus Americanis, libri quatuor (Hagæ Comitis, i. e. The Hague, 1652; again, Hemipoli, i. e. Halberstadt, 1669).[1572] His view was the Scythian one, but he held to later additions from the Phœnicians and Carthaginians on the Atlantic side, and from the Chinese on the Pacific.

For the next fifty years there were a number of writers on the subject, who are barely names to the present generation;[1573] but towards the middle of the eighteenth century the question was considered in The American Traveller (London, 1741), and by Charlevoix in his Nouvelle France (1744). The author of an Enquiry into the Origin of the Cherokees (Oxford, 1762) makes them the descendants of Meshek, son of Japhet. In 1767, however, the question was again brought into the range of a learned and disputatious discussion, reviving all the arguments of Grotius, De Laet, and Horn, when E. Bailli d’Engel published his Essai sur cette question: Quand et comment l’America a-t-elle été peuplée d’hommes et d’Animaux? (5 vols., Amsterdam, 1767, 2d ed., 1768). He argues for an antediluvian origin.[1574] The controversy which now followed was aroused by C. De Pauw’s characterization of all American products, man, animals, vegetation, as degraded and inferior to nature in the old world, in an essay which passed through various editions, and was attacked and defended in turn.[1575] An Italian, Count Carli, some years later, controverted De Pauw, and using every resource of mythology, tradition, geology, and astronomy, claimed for the Americans a descent from the Atlantides.[1576] It was not till after reports had come from the Ohio Valley of the extensive earthworks in that region that the question of the earlier peoples of America attracted much general attention throughout America; and the most conspicuous spokesman was President Stiles of Yale College, in an address which he delivered before the General Assembly of Connecticut, in 1783, on the future of the new republic.[1577] In this, while arguing for the unity of the American tribes and for their affinity with the Tartars, he held to their being in the main the descendants of the Canaanites expelled by Joshua, whether finding their way hither by the Asiatic route and establishing the northern Sachemdoms, or coming in Phœnician ships across the Atlantic to settle Mexico and Peru.[1578] Lafitau in 1724 (Mœurs de Sauvages) had contended for a Tartar origin. We have examples of the reasoning of a missionary in the views of the Moravian Loskiel, and of a learned controversialist in the treatise of Fritsch, in 1794 and 1796 respectively.[1579]

The earliest American with a scientific training to discuss the question was a professor in the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton, a man who acquired one of the best reputations in his day among Americans for studies in this and other questions of natural history. His father was an English clergyman settled in America, and his mother a sister of David Rittenhouse. It was while he was a student of medicine in Edinburgh that he first approached the subject of the origin of the Americans, in a little treatise on American Antiquities, which he never completed.[1580] His Papers relating to certain American Antiquities (Philad., 1796) consists of those read to the Amer. Philos. Soc., and printed in their Transactions (vol. iv.). They were published as the earnest of his later work on American Antiquities. He argues against De Pauw, and contends that the Americans are descended—at least some of them—from Asiatic peoples still recognized. The Papers include a letter from Col. Winthrop Sargent, Sept. 8, 1794, describing certain articles found in a mound at Cincinnati, and a letter upon them from Barton to Dr. Priestley. He in the end gave more careful attention to the subject, mainly on its linguistic side, and went farther than any one had gone before him in his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philad., 1797; 2d ed., enlarged, 1798).[1581] The book attracted much notice, and engaged the attention in some degree of European philologists, and made Barton at that time the most conspicuous student on these matters in America. Jefferson was at that time gathering material in similar studies, but his collections were finally burned in 1801. Barton, in dedicating his treatise to Jefferson, recognized the latter’s advance in the same direction. He believed his own gathering of original MS. material to be at that time more extensive than any other student had collected in America. His views had something of the comprehensiveness of his material, and he could not feel that he could point to any one special source of the indigenous population.

During the early years of the present century old theories and new were abundant. The powerful intellect and vast knowledge of Alexander von Humboldt were applied to the problem as he found it in Middle America. He announced some views on the primitive peoples in 1806, in the Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift (vol. xv.); but his ripened opinions found record in his Vues de Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris, 1816), and the Asiatic theory got a conservative yet definite advocate.

Hugh Williamson[1582] thought he found traces of the Hindoo in the higher arts of the Mexicans, and marks of the ruder Asiatics in the more northern American peoples. A conspicuous littérateur of the day, Samuel L. Mitchell, veered somewhat wildly about in his notions of a Malay, Tartar, and Scandinavian origin.[1583] Meanwhile something like organized efforts were making. The American Antiquarian Society was formed in 1812.[1584] Silliman began his Journal of Arts and Sciences in 1819, and both society and periodical proved instruments of wider inquiry. In the first volume published by the Antiquarian Society, Caleb Atwater, in his treatise on the Western Antiquities, gave the earliest sustained study of the subject, and believed in a general rather than in a particular Asiatic source. The man first to attract attention for his grouping of ascertained results, unaided by personal explorations, however, was Dr. James H. McCulloh, who published his Researches on America at Baltimore in 1816. The book passed to a second edition the next year, but received its final shape in the Researches, philosophical and antiquarian, concerning the aboriginal history of America (1829), a book which Prescott[1585] praised for its accumulated erudition, and Haven[1586] ranked high for its manifestations of industry and research, calling it encyclopædic in character. McCulloh examines the native traditions, but can evolve no satisfactory conclusion from them as to the origin of the Americans. The public mind, however, was not ripe for scholarly inquiry, and there was not that in McCulloh’s style to invite attention; and greater popularity followed upon the fanciful and dogmatic confidence of John Haywood,[1587] upon the somewhat vivid if unsteady speculations of C. S. Rafinesque,[1588] and even upon the itinerant Josiah Priest, who boasted of the circulation of thousands of copies of his popular books.[1589] John Delafield’s Inquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America (N. Y., 1839) revived the theory, never quite dormant, of the descent of the Mexicans from the riper peoples of Hindostan and Egypt; while the more barbarous red men came of the Mongol stock. The author ran through the whole range of philology, mythology, and many of the customs of the races, in reaching this conclusion. A little book by John McIntosh, Discovery of America and Origin of the North American Indians, published in Toronto, 1836, was reissued in N. Y. in 1843, and with enlargements in 1846, Origin of the North American Indians, continued down to 1859 to be repeatedly issued, or to have a seeming success by new dates.[1590]

When Columbus, approaching the main land of South America, imagined it a large island, he associated it with that belief so long current in the Old World, which placed the cradle of the race in the Indian Ocean,—a belief which in our day has been advocated by Haeckel, Caspari and Winchell,—and imagined he was on the coasts, skirting an interior, where lay the Garden of Eden.[1591] No one had then ventured on the belief that the doctrine of Genesis must be reconciled with any supposed counter-testimony by holding it to be but the record of the Jewish race. Columbus was not long in his grave when Theophrastus Paracelsus, in 1520, and before the belief in the continuity of North America with Asia was dispelled, and consequently before the question of how man and animals could have reached the New World was raised, first broached the heterodox view of the plurality of the human race. All the early disputants on the question of the origin of the American man looked either across the Atlantic or the Pacific for the primitive seed; nor was there any necessary connection between the arguments for an autochthonous American man and a diversity of race, when Fabricius, in 1721, published his Dissertatio Critica[1592] on the opinions of those who held that different races had been created. From that day the old orthodox interpretation of the record in Genesis found no contestant of mark till the question came up in relation to the American man, it being held quite sufficient to account for the inferiority or other distinguishing characteristics of race by assigning them to the influence of climate and physical causes.[1593]

The strongest presentation of the case, in considering the American man a distinct product of the American soil, with no connection with the Old World[1594] except in the case of the Eskimos, was made when S. G. Morton, in 1839, printed his Crania Americana, or a comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America, of which there was a second edition in 1844.[1595] Here was a new test, and applied, very likely, in ignorance of the fact that Governor Pownal, in 1766, in Knox’s New Collection of Voyages, had suggested it.[1596] Dr. Morton had gathered a collection of near a thousand skulls from all parts of the world,[1597] and based his deductions on these,—a process hardly safe, as many of his successors have determined.[1598] The views of Morton respecting the autochthonous origin of the Indian found an able upholder when Louis Agassiz, taking the broader view of the independent creation of higher and inferior races,[1599] gave in his adhesion to the original American man (Christian Examiner, July, 1850, vol. xlix. p. 110). These views got more extensive expression in a publication which appeared in Philadelphia in 1854, in which some unpublished papers of Morton are accompanied by a contribution from Agassiz, and all are grouped together and augmented by material of the editors, Dr. Josiah Clark Nott[1600] of Mobile, and Mr. George R. Gliddon, long a resident in Cairo. The Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches (Philad., 1854, 1859, 1871), met with a divided reception; the conservative theologians called it pretentious and false, and there was some color for their detraction in some rather jejune expositions of the Hebrew Scriptures contained in the book. The physiologists thought it brought new vigor to a question which properly belonged to science.[1601] Other fresh material, with some discussions, made up a new book by the same editors, published three years later, Indigenous Races of the Earth, or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry (Philad. and London, 1857; 2d ed., 1857).[1602]

The theological attacks were not always void of a contempt that ill befitted the work of refutation. The most important of them were John Bachman’s Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race (Charleston, S. C., 1850), with his Notice of the Types of Mankind (Charleston, 1854-55); and Thomas Smyth’s Unity of the Human Race proved by Scripture, Reason and Science (N. Y., 1850).[1603]

The scientific attack on Morton and Agassiz, and the views they represented, was an active one, and embraced such writers as Wilson, Latham, Pickering, and Quatrefages.[1604] The same collection of skulls which had furnished Morton with his proofs yielded exactly opposite evidence to Dr. J. A. Meigs in his Observations upon the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines (Philad., 1866).[1605] Two of the most celebrated of the evolutionists reject the autochthonous view, for Darwin’s Descent of Man and Haeckel’s Hist. of Creation consider the American man an emigrant from the old world, in whatever way the race may have developed.[1606]

Of the leading historians of the early American peoples, Prescott, dealing with the Mexicans, is inclined to agree with Humboldt’s arguments as to their primitive connection with Asia.[1607] Geo. Bancroft, in the third volume of his Hist. of the United States (1840), surveying the field, found little in the linguistic affinities, little in what Humboldt gathered from the Mexican calendars and from other developments, nothing from the Western mounds, which he was sure were natural earth-knobs and water-worn passages,[1608] and decides upon some transmission by the Pacific route from Asia, but so remote as to make the American tribes practically indigenous, so far as their character is concerned.

In 1843 another compiler of existing evidence appeared in Alexander W. Bradford in his American Antiquities, or Researches into the origin and history of the Red Race. His views were new. He connects the higher organized life of middle America with the corresponding culture of Southern Asia, the Polynesian islands probably furnishing the avenue of migrations; while the ruder and more northern peoples of both shores of the Pacific represent the same stock degraded by northern migrations.

In 1845 the American Ethnological Society began its publications, and in Albert Gallatin it had a vigorous helper in unravelling some of these mysteries. A few years later (1853) the United States government lent its patronage and prestige to the huge conglomerate publication of Schoolcraft, his Indian Tribes of the United States, which leaves the bewildered reader in a puzzling maze,—the inevitable result of a work undertaken beyond the ambitious powers of an untrained mind. The work is not without value if the user of it has more systematic knowledge than its compiler, to select, discard, and arrange, and if he can weigh the importance of the separate papers.[1609]

In 1856 Samuel F. Haven, the librarian and guiding spirit of the American Antiquarian Society, summed up, as it had never been done before, for comprehensiveness, and with a striking prescience, the progress and results of studies in this field, in his Archæology of the United States (Smithsonian Contributions, viii., Washington, 1856).

In 1851 Professor Daniel Wilson, in his Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, first brought into use the designation “prehistoric” as expressing “the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records; and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the archæologists of Europe.”[1610] Eleven years later he published his Prehistoric Man: Researches into the origin of civilization in the old and new world.[1611] The book unfortunately is not well fortified with references, but it is the result of long study, partly in the field, and written with a commendable reserve of judgment. It is in the main concerned with the western hemisphere, which he assumes with little hesitation “began its human period subsequent to that of the old world, and so started later in the race of civilization.” While thus in effect a study of early man in America, its scope makes it in good degree a complement to the Origin of Civilization of Lubbock.

The comparative study of ethnological traces, to enable us to depict the earliest condition of human society, owes a special indebtedness to Edward B. Tylor, among writers in English. It is nearly twenty-five years since he first published his Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization,[1612] the work almost, if not quite, of a pioneer in this interesting field, and he has supplied the reader with all the references necessary to test his examples. Max Müller (Chips, ii. 262) has pointed out how he has vitalized his vast accumulation of facts by coherent classifications instead of leaving them an oppressive burden by simple aggregation, as his precursors in Germany, Gustav Klemm[1613] and Adolf Bastian, had done; and it is remarked that while thus classifying, he has not been lured into pronounced theory, which future accession of material might serve to modify or change. He shortly afterwards touched a phase of the subject which he had not developed in his book in a paper on “Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man,”[1614] and illustrated the methods he was pursuing in another on “The Condition of Prehistoric Races as inferred from observations of modern tribes.”[1615]

The postulate of which he has been a distinguished expounder, that man has progressed from barbarism to civilization, was a main deduction to be drawn from his next sustained work, Primitive Culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom.[1616] The chief points of this further study of the thought, belief, art, and custom of the primitive man had been advanced tentatively in various other papers beside those already mentioned,[1617] and in this new work he further acknowledges his obligations to Adolf Bastian’s Mensch in der Geschichte and Theodor Waitz’s Anthropologie der Naturvölker.[1618] He still pursued his plan of collecting wide and minute evidence from the writers on ethnography and kindred sciences, and from historians, travellers, and missionaries, as his foot-notes abundantly testify.

These studies of Professor Tylor abundantly qualified him to give a condensed exposition of the science of anthropology, which he had done so much to place within the range of scientific studies, by a primary search for facts and laws; and having contributed the article on that subject to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, he published in 1881 his Anthropology: an Introduction to the study of man and civilization (London and N. Y., 1881 and 1888). He maps out the new science, which has now received of late years so many new students in the scientific method, without references, but with the authority of a teacher, tracing what man has been and is under the differences of sex, race, beliefs, habits, and society.[1619] Again, at the Montreal meeting (August, 1884) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he set down in an address the bounds of the “American Aspects of Anthropology.”[1620]

Closely following upon Tylor in this field, and gathering his material with much the same assiduity, and presenting it with similar beliefs, though with enough individuality to mark a distinction, was another Englishman, who probably shares with Tylor the leading position in this department of study. Sir John Lubbock, in his Prehistoric Times as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages,[1621] gathered the evidence which exists of the primitive condition of man, embracing some chapters on modern savages so far as they are ignorant of the use of metals, as the best study we can follow, to fill out the picture of races only archæologically known to us. This study of modern savage life, in arts, marriages, and relationships, morals, religion, and laws, is, as he holds, a necessary avenue to the knowledge of a condition of the early man, from which by various influences the race has advanced to what is called civilization. His result in this comparative study—not indeed covering all the phases of savage life—he made known in his Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man.[1622] While referring to Tylor’s Early Hist. of Mankind as more nearly like his own than any existing treatise, but showing, as compared with his own book, “that no two minds would view the subject in the same manner,” he instanced previous treatments of certain phases of the subject, like Müller’s Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, J. F. M’Lennan’s Primitive Marriage,[1623] and J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Stuttgart, 1861); and even Lord Kames’ History of Man, and Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, notwithstanding the absence in them of much of the minute knowledge now necessary to the study of the subject. These data, of course, are largely obtained from travellers and missionaries, and Lubbock complains of their unsatisfactory extent and accuracy. “Travellers,” he adds, “find it easier to describe the houses, boats, food, dress, weapons, and implements of savages than to understand their thoughts and feelings.”

The main controversial point arising out of all this study is the one already adverted to,—whether man has advanced from savagery to his present condition, or has preserved, with occasional retrogressions, his original elevated character; and this causes the other question, whether the modern savage is the degenerate descendant of the same civilized first men. “There is no scientific evidence which would justify us,” says Lubbock (Prehist. Times, 417), “in asserting that this kind of degradation applies to savages in general.”[1624] The most distinguished advocate of the affirmative of this proposition is Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, both in his Political Economy and in his lecture on the Origin of Civilization (1855), in which he undertook to affirm that no nation, unaided by a superior race, ever succeeded in raising itself out of savagery, and that nations can become degraded. Lubbock, who, with Tylor, holds the converse of this proposition, answered Whately in an appendix to his Origin of Civilization, which was originally given as a paper at the Dundee meeting of the British Association.[1625] The Duke of Argyle, while not prepared to go to the extent of Whately’s views, attacked, in his Primeval Man, Lubbock’s argument,[1626] and was in turn reviewed adversely by Lubbock, in a paper read at the Exeter meeting of the same association (1869), which is also included in the appendix of his Origin of Civilization. Lubbock seems to show, in some instances at least, that the duke did not possess himself correctly of some of the views of his opponents.

In the researches of Tylor and Lubbock, and of all the others cited above, the American Indian is the source of many of their illustrations. Of all writers on this continent, Sir John Wm. Dawson in his Fossil Men, and Southall in his Recent Origin of Man, are probably the most eminent advocates of the views of Whately and Argyle, however modified, and both have declared it an unfounded assumption that the primitive man was a savage.[1627] Morgan, in his Ancient Society (N. Y., 1877), has, on the other hand, sketched the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization.

One of the defenders of the supposed Bible limits best equipped by reading, if not in the scientific spirit, has been a Virginian, James C. Southall, who published a large octavo in 1875, The Recent Origin of Man as illustrated by geology and the modern science of prehistoric archæology (Philad., 1875). Three years later,—leaving out some irrelevant matters as touching the antiquity of man, condensing his collations of detail, sparing the men of science an attack for what in his earlier volume he called their fickleness, and somewhat veiling his set purpose of sustaining the Bible record,—he published a more effective little book, The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Apparition of Man upon Earth (Philad., 1878). Barring its essentially controversial character, and waiving judgment on its scientific decisions, it is one of the best condensed accumulations of data which has been made. His belief in the literal worth of the Bible narrative is emphatic. He thinks that man, abruptly and fully civilized, appeared in the East, and gave rise to the Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, while the estrays that wandered westward are known to us by their remains, as the early savage denizens of Europe. To maintain this existence of the hunter-man of Europe within historic times, he rejects the prevailing opinions of the geologists and archæologists. He reverses the judgment that Lyell expresses (Student’s Elements of Geology, Am. ed., 162) of the historical period as not affording any appreciable measure for calculating the number of centuries necessary to produce so many extinct animals, to deepen and widen valleys, and to lay so deep stalagmite floors, and says it does. He contends that the stone age is not divided into the earlier and later periods with an interval, but that the mingling of the kinds of flints shows but different phases of the same period,[1628] and that what others call the palæolithic man was in reality the quaternary man, with conditions not much different from now.[1629] The time when the ice retreated from the now temperate regions he holds to have been about 2000 b.c., and he looks to the proofs of the action of which traces are left along the North American great lakes, as observed by Professor Edmund Andrews[1630] of Chicago, to confirm his judgment of the Glacial age being from 5,300 to 7,500 years ago.[1631] He claims that force has not been sufficiently recognized as an element in geological action, and that a great lapse of time was not necessary to effect geological changes (Ep. of the M., 194).[1632] He thinks the present drift of opinion, carrying back the appearance of man anywhere from 20,000 to 9,000,000 years, a mere fashion. The gravel of the Somme has been, he holds, a rapid deposit in valleys already formed and not necessarily old. The peat beds were a deposit from the flood that followed the glacial period, and accumulated rapidly (Ep. of the M., ch. 10). The extinct animals found with the tools of man in the caves simply show that such beasts survived to within historic times, as seems everywhere apparent as regards the mastodon when found in America. The stalagmites of the caves are of unequal growth, and it is an assumption to give them uniformly great age. The finely worked flints found among those called palæolithic; the skilfully free drawings of the cave-men; the bits of pottery discovered with the rude flints, and the great similarity of the implements to those in use to-day among the Eskimos; the finding of Roman coin in the Danish shell heaps and an English one in those of America (Proc. Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci., 1866, p. 291),—are all parts of the argument which satisfies him that the archæologists have been hasty and inconclusive in their deductions. They in turn will dispute both his facts and conclusions.[1633]

Southall’s arraignment of the opinions generally held may introduce us to a classification of the data upon which archæologists rely to reach conclusions upon the antiquity of man, and over some of which there is certainly no prevailing consensus of opinion. We may find a condensed summary of beliefs and data respecting the antiquity of man in J. P. Maclean’s Manual of the Antiquity of Man (Cincinnati, revised ed., 1877; again, 1880).[1634] The independent view and conservative spirit are placed respectively in juxtaposition in J. P. Lesley’s Origin and Decline of Man (ch. 3), and in Dawson’s Fossil Men (ch. 8).[1635] The opinions of leading English archæologists are found in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times (ch. 12), Wallace’s Tropical Nature (ch. 7), and Huxley’s “Distribution of Races in Relation to the Antiquity of Man,” in Internat. Cong. of Prehist. Archæol. Trans. (1868). Dawkins has given some recent views in The Nation, xxvi. 434, and in Kansas City Review, vii. 344.[1636] Not to refer to special phases, the French school will be found represented in Nadaillac’s Les Premiers Hommes (ii. ch. 13); in Gabriel de Mortillet’s La préhistorique antiquité de l’homme (Paris, 1883); Hamy’s Précis de paléontologie humaine; Le Hon’s L’homme fossile (1867); Victor Meunier’s Les Ancêtres d’Adam (Paris, 1875); Joly’s L’homme avant métaux (Eng. transl. Man before Metals, N. Y., 1883); Revue des Questions historiques (vol. xvi.). The German school is represented in Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte; Waitz’s Anthropologie; Carl Vogt’s Lectures on Man (Eng. transl., Lond., 1864); and L. Büchner’s Der Mensch und seine Stellung in der Natur (2d ed., Leipzig, 1872; or W. S. Dallas’s Eng. translation, Lond., 1872). The history of the growth of geological antagonism to the biblical record as once understood, and the several methods proposed for reconciling their respective teaching, is traced concisely in the article on geology in M’Clintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia, with references for further examination. The views there given are those propounded by Chalmers in 1804, that the geological record, ignored in the account of Genesis, finds its place in that book between the first and second verses,[1637] which have no dependence on one another, and that the biblical account of creation followed in six literal days. What may be considered the present theological attitude of churchmen may be noted in The Speaker’s Commentary (N. Y. ed., 1871, p. 61).

The question of the territorial connection of America with Asia under earlier geological conditions is necessarily considered in some of the discussions on the transplanting of the American man from the side of Asia.

Otto Caspari in his Urgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig, 1873), vol. i., gives a map of Asia and America in the post-tertiary period, as he understands it, which stretches the Asiatic and African continents over a large part of the Indian Ocean; and in this region, now beneath the sea, he places the home of the primeval man, and marks the lines of migration east, north, and west. This view is accepted by Winchell in his Preadamites (see his map). Haeckel (Nat. Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1868, 1873; Eng. transl. 1876) calls this region “Lemuria” in his map. Caspari places large continental islands between this region and South America, which rendered migration to South America easy. The eastern shore of the present Asia is extended beyond the Japanese islands, and similar convenient islands render the passage by other lines of immigration easy to the regions of British Columbia and of Mexico. (Cf. Short, 507; Baldwin, App.) Howorth, Mammoth and the Flood, supposes a connection at Behring’s Straits. The supposed similarity of the flora of the two shores of the Pacific has been used to support this theory, but botanists say that the language of Hooker and Gray has been given a meaning they did not intend. It is opposed by many eminent geologists. A. R. Wallace (Journal Amer. Geog. Soc., xix.) finds no ground to believe that any of the oceans contain sunken continents. (Cf. his Geographical Distribution of Animals and his Malay Archipelago.) James Croll in his Climate and Cosmology (p. 6) says: “There is no geological evidence to show that at least since Silurian times the Atlantic and Pacific were ever in their broad features otherwise than they now are.”[1638] Hyde Clarke has examined the legend of Atlantis in reference to protohistoric communication with America, in Royal Hist. Soc. Trans., n. s., iii. p. 1.[1639]

The arguments for the great antiquity of man[1640] are deduced in the main from the testimony of the river gravels, the bone caves, the peat deposits, the shell heaps, and the Lacustrine villages, for the mounds and other relics of defence, habitation, and worship are very likely not the records of a great antiquity. The whole field is surveyed with more fullness than anywhere else, and with a faith in the geological antiquity of the race, in Sir Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.[1641] With as firm a belief in the integrity of the biblical record, and in its not being impugned by the discoveries or inductions of science, we find a survey in Southall’s Recent Origin of Man. These two books constitute the extremes of the methods, both for and against the conservative interpretation of the Bible. The independent spirit of the scientist is nowhere more confidently expressed than by J. P. Lesley (Man’s Origin and Destiny, Philad., 1868, p. 45), who says: “There is no alliance possible between Jewish theology and modern science.... Geologists have won the right to be Christians without first becoming Jews.” Southall[1642] interprets this spirit in this wise: “I do not recollect that the Antiquity of Man ever recognizes that the book of Genesis is in existence; and yet every one is perfectly conscious that the author has it in mind, and is writing at it all the time.”[1643] The entire literature of the scientific interpretation shows that the canons of criticism are not yet secure enough to prevent the widest interpretations and inferences.

The intimations which are supposed to exist in the Bible of a race earlier than Adam have given rise to what is called the theory of the Preadamites, and there is little noteworthy upon it in European literature back of Isaac de La Peyrère’s Praeadamitae (Paris and Amsterdam, 1655), whose views were put into English in Man before Adam (London, 1656).[1644] The advocates of the theory from that day to this are enumerated in Alexander Winchell’s Preadamites (Chicago, 1880), and this book is the best known contribution to the subject by an American author. It is his opinion that the aboriginal American, with the Mongoloids in general, comes from some descendant of Adam earlier than Noah, and that the black races come from a stock earlier than Adam, whom Cain found when he went out of his native country.[1645]

The investigations of the great antiquity of man in America fall far short in extent of those which have been given to his geological remoteness in Europe; and yet, should we believe with Winchell that the American man represents the pre-Adamite, while the European man does not, we might reasonably hope to find in America earlier traces of the geological man, if, as Agassiz shows, the greater age of the American continent weighs in the question.[1646]

The explicit proofs, as advanced by different geologists, to give a great antiquity to the American man, and perhaps in some ways greater than to the European man,[1647] may now be briefly considered in detail.

Oldest of all may perhaps be placed the gold-drift of California, with its human remains, and chief among them the Calaveras skull, which is claimed to be of the Pliocene (tertiary) age; but it must be remembered that Powell and the government geologists call it quaternary. It was in February, 1866, that in a mining shaft in Calaveras County, California, a hundred and thirty feet below the surface, a skull was found imbedded in gravel, which under the name of the Calaveras skull has excited much interest. It was not the first time that human remains had been found in these California gravels, but it was the first discovery that attracted notice. It was not seen in situ by a professional geologist, and a few weeks elapsed before Professor Josiah Dwight Whitney, then state geologist of California, visited the spot, and satisfied himself that the geological conditions were such as to make it certain that the skull and the deposition of the gravel were of the same age. The relic subsequently passed into the possession of Professor Whitney, and the annexed cut is reproduced from the careful drawing made of it for the Memoirs of the Museum of Comp. Zoölogy (Harvard University), vol. vi. He had published earlier an account in the Revue d’Anthropologie (1872), p. 760.[1648] This interesting relic is now in Cambridge, coated with thin wax for preservation, but this coating interferes with any satisfactory photograph. The volume of Memoirs above named is made up of Whitney’s Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California (1880), and at p. ix he says: “There will undoubtedly be much hesitancy on the part of anthropologists and others in accepting the results regarding the Tertiary Age of man, to which our investigations seem so clearly to point.” He says that those who reject the evidence of the Calaveras skull because it was not seen in situ by a scientific observer forget the evidence of the fossil itself; and he adds that since 1866 the other evidence for tertiary man has so accumulated that “it would not be materially weakened by dropping that furnished by the Calaveras skull itself.”