Unimportant as are the Eskimo in a political and historical view, their peculiar geographical position gives them an importance in all questions of ethnology: since one of the highest problems turns upon the affinities of this family.
It has long been known that the nation which inhabits Greenland and Labrador is the nation which inhabits the North-western parts of Russian America as well. It is found on the American side of Behring's Straits, and it is found on the Asiatic side also. So that the _Eskimo is the only family common to the Old and New World_; an important fact in itself, and one made more important still by the Eskimo localities being the only localities where the two continents come into proximity.
Now, if these facts had stood alone, unmodified by any phænomena that detracted from their significance, the peopling of America would have been no more a mystery than the peopling of Europe. Such, however, is not the case. They neither stand alone, nor stand unmodified.
The reasons that lie against what is, at the first blush, the common sense answer to the question, _how was America peopled?_ are, chiefly, as follows--
1. The distance of the north-eastern parts of Asia from any probable centre of population--_cradle of the human race_--so-called. For these parts to have been the passage, Kamskatka must have been full to overflowing before the the Mississippi had been trodden by the foot of a human being.
2. The physical differences between the Eskimo and the American Indian.
3. The difficulties presented by the Eskimo language.
It is only these two last reasons to which I attribute much validity. The first of the three I put low in the way of an objection; _i. e._, not much higher than I put the systems founded upon the Icelandic and Welsh traditions, the drifting of Japanese junks, and the effects of winds and currents upon Polynesian canoes. Without, at present, doubting whether the occurrences here alluded to have happened _since_ America was peopled by the present race, I limit myself to an expression of dissent from the doctrine that by any such unsatisfactory processes the _original_ population found its way: in other words, I believe that our only choice lies between the doctrine that makes the American nations to have originated from one or more separate pairs of progenitors, and the doctrine that either Behring's Straits or the line of Islands between Kamskatka and the Peninsula of Aliaska, was the highway between the two worlds--from Asia to America, or _vice versâ_. I say _vice versâ_, since it by no means follows that, because Asia and America shall have been peopled by the same race, the original of that race must, _necessarily_, have arisen in Asia; inasmuch as the statement that _the descendants of the same pair peopled two continents_, taken alone, proves nothing as to the particular continent in which that pair first appeared. Against America, and in favour of Asia being the birthplace of the Human Race--its unity being assumed--I know many valid reasons; reasons valid enough and numerous enough to have made the notion of _New_ World being the oldest of two a paradox. Nevertheless, I know no absolutely conclusive ones.
