The cranial forms of the American aborigines have by some been supposed
to present anomalies distinguishing their race from all others, and even
its chief families from one another. This, too, falls to the ground
before a rigid analysis. The last word of craniology, which at one time
promised to revolutionize ethnology and even history, is that no one form
of the skull is peculiar to the natives of the New World; that in the
same linguistic family one glides into another by imperceptible degrees;
and that there is as much diversity, and the same diversity among them in
this respect as among the races of the Old Continent.[35-2] Peculiarities
of structure, though they may pass as general truths, offer no firm
foundation whereon to construct a scientific ethnology. Anatomy shows
nothing unique in the Indian, nothing demanding for its development any
special antiquity, still less an original diversity of type.
On the other hand, the remains of primeval art and the impress he made
upon nature bespeak for man a residence in the New World coeval with the
most distant events of history.
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