The Indians of Columbus

State club from the Marquesas
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The racial affinities of the Americans also point, not across the Atlantic, but across the Pacific. When Columbus said of the natives of the West Indies, "they are neither white nor black," he means that he can compare them neither with Europeans nor negroes.

In later times the difference of the Americans from negroes, and their resemblance to the races on the western border of the Pacific, has often been more clearly indicated. Whatever isolated characteristics we may yet be able to adduce among all races at a similar level of civilisation the Americans stand nearest to those who live to the westward of them.

If we unroll a map on Mercator's projection, and cast our eyes upon the earth and its races, the Americans find their place on the east wing contrasted with, and furthest separated from those who have their dwelling on the eastern border of the dividing gulf of the Atlantic ocean.

State club from
the Marquesas

As the most easterly part of the Pacific-American region of the stone-using countries. America is at the same time the true Orient of the inhabited earth. The whole of America shares with Polynesia and did once share with share with Northern Asia, all the distinctive marks of stone-age countries, which have sometimes a more Polynesian, sometimes a more Northern Asiatic character. It is, however, in many respects poorer than either, since it possesses neither the pig nor the taro of the Polynesians, nor the reindeer herds of Northern Asia. This poverty, due to remoteness, confirms us in the notion that in America we have the final link in a chain of distribution of which the beginning is to be sought on the eastern shore of the Atlantic.

State club from
the Marquesas

With the ordinary idea that American evolution exhibits an isolated, almost insulated, independence, our view is only apparently in contradiction. Within the lines of its affinity with the eastern lands of the inhabited world, America is, in any case, a region of extreme independence, firmly based on the geographical fact of its situation between the two largest oceans. But this finds expression far less in individual ethnographical peculiarities than in points of conformity which mark it off as a whole. The specialty is not of kind but of degree.

Bodily Characteristics

If we look at bodily characteristics, the conformity of all Red Indians among themselves is very great, so long as we consider skin, hair, and physiognomy; but if we include the skull, it breaks down. Here we are in presence of the same contradiction that meets us as an internal point of difference among the islanders of the Pacific. With A. von Humboldt, with the Prince of Wied, and with Morton, we can only hold fast to the external unity of the race. The results of investigating the skulls will, to all appearance, only prove that a more ancient variety of racial elements is concealed under the insular uniformity of to-day.

But there can be no doubt as to the affinity of the American tribes with the great Mongoloid race, and, moreover, with that branch of it to which the dwellers in Eastern Oceania belong. Of both the similarity is shown in a comparison of colour, hair, and skeleton.