Excerpt from Portraits of the Aborigines of Canada and Notes on the Tribes The whole of the New World when first discovered by Europeans was occupied by the red race, They were called Indians by Columbus, who thought he had discovered India, and this name has clung to them. Ethnographers call them Americans, or the American race. One of the favorite theories of the day is that they originally came from Asia. Some of the leading ethnologists controvert this and point to Europe, basing their opinion upon geological facts. At ...
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Excerpt from Portraits of the Aborigines of Canada and Notes on the Tribes The whole of the New World when first discovered by Europeans was occupied by the red race, They were called Indians by Columbus, who thought he had discovered India, and this name has clung to them. Ethnographers call them Americans, or the American race. One of the favorite theories of the day is that they originally came from Asia. Some of the leading ethnologists controvert this and point to Europe, basing their opinion upon geological facts. At the close of the last glacial epoch, and for an indeterminate time previous, the comparatively shallow bed of the North Atlantic was above water; and this was about the time that we find men in the same stage of culture dwelling on both its shores, and it is placed beyond cavil, that the extreme antiquity of man in America reaches into a past for which we have no time measure. As an instance of the mental powers of the Indian, in ancient America there are examples of firm and stable states, extending their sway widely and directed by definite policy. The league of the Iroquois was a thoroughly statesmanlike creation, and the realm of Peru had a long and successful existence. That this mental quality is real is shewn by the recent history of some of the spanish-american republics. Two of them, Guatemala and Mexico, count among their ablest Presidents, in the present generation, pure-blood American Indians. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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