inent wandered forth from the steppes and valleys at the head waters
of the Rio de la Plata toward the Gulf of Mexico, where they came in
collision with that other wave of migration surging down from high
northern latitudes. For the banks of the river Paraguay and the steppes
of the Bolivian Cordilleras are unquestionably the earliest traditional
homes of both Tupis and Aymaras.

These movements took place not in large bodies under the stimulus of a
settled purpose, but step by step, family by family, as the older
hunting grounds became too thickly peopled. This fact hints unmistakably
at the gray antiquity of the race. It were idle even to guess how great
this must be, but it is possible to set limits to it in both directions.
On the one hand, not a tittle of evidence is on record to carry the age
of man in America beyond the present geological epoch. Dr. Lund examined
in Brazil more than eight hundred caverns, out of which number only six
contained human bones, and of these six only one had with the human
bones those of animals now extinct. Even in that instance the original
stratification had been disturbed, and probably the bones had been
interred there.[35-1] This is strong negative evidence. So in every
other example where an unbiased and competent geologist has made the
examination, the alleged discoveries of human remains in the older
strata have proved erroneous.

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