the gens and the communal dwelling, the fact still is that in studying the Central American remains we find ourselves dealing with a race who had got beyond mere household architecture, and were rising to the sphere of art, so that their attempts in this respect must enter into our estimate. In studying them from this point of view, we encounter new difficulties which Morgan wholly ignores, and which later investigators have not as yet satisfactorily explained. The tales of the Spanish conquerors are scarcely harder to accept than the assumption that all the artistic decoration of the Yucatan edifices was lavished upon communal houses, built only to be densely packed with Indians "in the Middle Status of Barbarism," as Morgan calls them. That a statue like that of Chaac-Mol, discovered by Dr. Le Plongeon at Chichen-Itza, should have been produced by a race not differing in descent or essential habits from the northern Iroquois seems simply incredible.

Consider the difference. In Central America we find the remains of a race which had begun to busy itself with the very highest department of art—the delineation of the human figure; and which had attained to grace and vigor, if not yet to beauty, in this direction. The stately stone heads of Yucatan; the arch and spirited features depicted on the Maya incense-burners; the fine face carved in sandstone, brought from Topila, and now in possession of the New York Historical Society-these indicate a sphere of development utterly beyond that of those northern Indians whose utmost achievement consists in some graceful vase like that found in Burlington, Vermont, and now preserved by the university there.

It is safer to leave the question where it was left

by another deceased American archæologist scarcely less eminent than Morgan, and not less courageous, but far more gentle and more guarded-Samuel Foster Haven, of Worcester, Massachusetts, the accomplished librarian of the American Antiquarian Society: "Mr. Morgan has grasped some of the problems of aboriginal character and habits with a firm and vigorous hand, but is far from being entitled to claim that he has discovered the entire secret of prehistoric life on this continent."

But now suppose the modern theory to be accepted in its fulness. Let us agree, for the moment, with Morgan, that there was in America, when discovered, but one race of Indians besides the Eskimo the Red Race. Still there lies behind us the problem, in whose solution science has hardly yet gained even a foothold, Whence did this race originate? Here we deliberately confuse ourselves a little by the word

discovery." When we speak of the discovery of America we always mean the arrival of Europeans, forgetting that there was possibly a time when Europe itself was first discovered by Asiatics, and that for those Asiatics it was almost as easy to discover America. All that is necessary, even at this day, to bring a Japanese junk to the Pacific coast of North America is that it should be blown out to sea and then lose its rudder; the first mishap has often happened, the second casualty has almost always followed, and the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, the Kuro Siwo, or "black stream," or "Japan current," has done the rest. Mr. Charles W. Brooks, of San Francisco, had a record of no less than a hundred such instances, and there is no reason why similar events should not have been occurring for centuries. Nor is it, indeed,

needful to go so far as this for a means of communication. Bering Strait is but little wider than the English Channel, and it is as easy to make the passage from Asia to America as from France to England; and indeed easier for half the year, when Bering Strait is frozen. Besides all this, both geology and botany indicate that the separation between the two continents did not always exist. Dr. Asa Gray, our highest botanical authority, early pointed out the extraordinary identity between the Japanese flora and that of the northern United States, as indicating a period when the two continents were one. The colonization of America from Asia was thus practicable, at any rate, and that far more easily than any approach from the European side. The simple races on each side of Bering Strait, which now communicate with each other freely, may have done the same from very early times. They needed no consent of sovereigns to do it: they were not obliged to wait humbly in the antechamber of some king, suing for permission to discover for him another world. This we must recognize at the outset; but when it is granted, we are still upon the threshold. Concede that America is but an outlying Asia, it does not follow that America was peopled from Asia; the course of population may first have gone the other way. Or it may be that the human race had upon each continent an autochthonous or indigenous place, according as we prefer a hard Greek word or a hard Latin word to express the simple fact that a race comes into existence on a certain soil instead of migrating thither. Migrations, too, in plenty may in this case have come afterwards, and modified the type, giving to it that Asiatic or Mongoloid cast

which is now acknowledged by almost all ethnologists.

How long may this process of migration and mingling have gone on upon the American continent? Who can tell? Sir John Lubbock says "not more than three thousand years." The late John Fiske concluded that there had been no appreciable communication between America and Asia for at least twenty thousand years. Plainly it is not so easy to fix a limit. To be sure, some evidences of antiquity that are well established in Europe are as yet wanting in America, or at least imperfectly proved. In the French bone-caves there have been found unquestionable representations of the mammoth scratched on pieces of its own ivory, and exhibiting the shaggy hair and curved tusks that distinguish it from all other elephants. There is as yet no such direct and unequivocal evidence in America of the existence of man during the interglacial period. The alleged evidence fails to satisfy the more cautious archæologists. The so-called "elephants' trunks” used in ornamentation on the Central American buildings offer only a vague and remote resemblance to the supposed originals. The "elephant pipe" dug up in Iowa, and preserved by the Davenport Academy of Sciences, does not quite command confidence as to its genuineness. The "Elephant Mound," described and figured in the Smithsonian Report for 1872, has a merely suggestive resemblance, like most of the mounds, to the objects whose name it bears. Lapham long since pointed out that the names of "Lizard Mound," "Serpent Mound," and the like, are usually based on very remote similarities; and Squier tells us of one mound which had been likened

successively to a bird, a bow and arrow, and a

man.

Other sources of evidence are scarcely more satisfactory. There is no doubt that mammoth bones have been found mingled with arrow-heads in some places, and with matting or pottery in others; but unhappily some doubt rests as yet on all these discoveries. It is in no case quite sure that the deposits had remained undisturbed as found, or that they had not been washed together by floods of water. Up to the present time the strongest argument in favor of the very early existence of man upon this continent is not to be found in such comparatively simple lines of evidence, but in the investigations of Dr. Abbott among primeval implements in New Jersey, or those of Professor J. D. Whitney among human remains in California. These and similar inquiries may yet conclusively establish the fact that the aboriginal American man was contemporary with the mammoth; in the mean time it is only possible, not quite proved.

Must we not admit that in our efforts to explain the origin of the first American man it is necessary to end, after all, with an interrogation mark?