en the Old and New Worlds is
the Aleutian chain of islands connecting Kamschatka with Alaska, the
ethnologist is occasionally led to think by certain evidence that
there may, both earlier and later, have existed another way of
reaching western America from south-eastern Asia through Pacific
archipelagoes and islets now sunk below the sea. In any case it seems
quite probable that men of Mongolian or Polynesian type reached
America on its western coasts long before the European came from the
north-east and east, and that they were helped on this long journey by
touching at islands since submerged by earthquake shocks or tidal
waves.

The aboriginal natives of North and South America seem to be of
entirely Asiatic origin; and such resemblances as there are between
the North-American Indians and the peoples of northern Europe do not
arise (we believe) from any ancient colonization of America from
western or northern Europe, but mainly from the fact that the
North-American Indians and the Eskimo (two distinct types of people)
are descended from the same human stocks as the ancient populations of
the northern part of Europe and Asia.

It was--we think--from the far _north-west_ of Europe that America was
first visited by the true White man, though there has been an ancient
immigration of imperfect "White" men (Ainu) from Kamschatka. Three or
four hundred years after the birth of Christ there were great race
movements in northern and central Europe, due to an increase of
population and insufficiency of food. Not only did these white
barbarians (though they were not as barbarous as we were led to think
by Greek and Roman literature) invade southern Europe, North Africa,
and Asia Minor, but from the fourth century of the Christian era
onwards they began to cross over to England and Scotland. At the same
time they took more complete possession of Scandinavia, driving north
before their advance the more primitive peoples like the Lapps and
Finns, who were allied to the stock from which arose both the Eskimo
and the Amerindian.[1] All this time the Goths and Scandinavians
were either learning ideas of navigation from the Romans of the
Mediterranean or the Greeks of the Black Sea, or they were inventing
for themselves better ways of constructing ships; and although they
propelled them mainly by oars, they used masts and sails as well.[2]
Having got over the fear of the sea sufficiently to reach the coasts
of England and Scotland,