ization of America. Evidently the
prehistoric Peruvians, Mexicans, Pueblos, and Mound-Builders had
elements of civilization greater than the living warring Indian tribes
which came in contact with the early European settlers in America.

It may not be wise to enter a plea that all tribes and races have their
infancy, youth, age, and decay, with extinction as their final lot, but
it has been repeated so often in the history of the human race that one
may assume it to be almost, if not quite, universal. The momentum of
racial power gained by biological heredity and social achievement,
reaches its limit when it can no longer adapt itself to new conditions,
with the final end and inevitable result of extinction.

The Nordic race, with all of its vigor and persistency, has {201} had a
long and continuous life on account of its roving disposition and its
perpetual contact with new conditions of its own choice. It has always
had power to overcome, and its vigor has kept it exploiting and
inventing and borrowing of others the elements of civilization, which
have continually forced it forward. When it, too, reaches a state when
it cannot adapt itself to new conditions, perhaps it will give way to
some other branch of the human race, which, gathering new strength or
new vigor from sources not available to the Nordic, will be able to
overpower it; but the development of science and art with the power
over nature, is greater in this race than in any other, and the
maladies which destroy racial life are less marked than in other races.
It would seem, then, that it still has great power of continuance and
through science can adapt itself to nature and live on.

But what would the American Indian have contributed to civilization?
Would modern civilization have been as far advanced as now, had the
Europeans found no human life at all on the American continent? True,
the Europeans learned many things of the Indians regarding cultivation
of maize and tobacco, and thus increased their food supply, but would
they not have learned this by their own investigations, had there been
no Indians to teach? The arts of pottery have been more highly
developed by the Etruscans, the Aegeans, and the Greeks than by the
American Indians. The Europeans had long since passed the Stone Age
and entered the Iron Age, which they brought to the American Indians.
But the studies of ethnology have been greatly enlarged by the fact of
these peculiar and