CHAPTER II.
THE INDIAN. — HIS ORIGIN, NUMBERS, PERSON, AND CHARACTER.
It 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 inter-
